THE

METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JULY, 1854.

ART. I-THE POSITIVE RELIGION: OR, RELIGION OF
HUMANITY.

1. République Occidentale. Ordre et Progrès. Discours sur l'Ensemble du Positivisme, ou Exposition sommaire de la doctrine philosophique et sociale propre à la grande République Occidentale, composée des cinq populations avancées Française, Italienne, Germanique, Britannique, et Espagnole, toujours solidaires depuis Charlemagne. Par Auguste Comte. Auteur du Système de Philosophie Positive. Réorganiser sans dieu ni roi, par le Culte Systématique de l'Humanité, Nul n'a droit qu'à faire son devoir.

L'esprit doit toujours être le ministre du cœur, et jamais son esclave. Paris: A la libraire Scientifique-Industrielle de L. Mathias, 15 Quai Malaquais, Juillet. 1848. 1 vol., 8vo.

2. République Occidentale. Ordre et Progrès. Vivre pour autrui. Catéchisme Positiviste, ou Sommaire Exposition de la Religion Universelle, en onze entretiens systématiques entre une Femme et un Prêtre de l'Humanité. Par AUGUSTE COMTE, &C.

L'Amour pour principe, L'Ordre pour base, Et le Progrès pour but. Paris. Chez l'Auteur: 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, &c. Octobre, 1852. 1 vol. 12mo. 3. Système de Politique Positive, ou Traité de Sociologie, Instituant la Religion de l'Humanité. Par AUGUSTE COMTE, &C. Paris, vol. 1, Juillet, 1851; vol. 2,

Paris, Mai, 1852.

FROM the philosophy of M. Comte we proceed to his religion. We have estimated, to the best of our ability, his speculative merits as the reformer and legislator of the domain of thought; we now proceed to examine his pretensions in the realm of practice, and are required to estimate him in his novel mission of self-authorized prophet and self-constituted hierarch. If, in the prosecution of this inquiry, we refrain from indulging in either the ridicule or the sarcasm which he continually provokes, we trust that our forbearance will not be misconstrued. The temptation to such a procedure is constant and inviting; but in the grave discussion of a vast and ingenious theory, we disdain to use the weapons of guerrilla controversy FOURTH SERIES, VOL. VI.-21

which M. Comte almost thrusts into our hands. Our object does not admit of the sportive graces and the fascinating levities of literary recreation: we have undertaken the arduous task of tracing to their fountain-heads the streams of Positive delusion, and of reconducting the waters of truth which are mingled with them, through new channels, to spread verdure and freshness over the very lands which they now cover with miasma and pestilence.

We have taken the trouble to copy in extenso the long title-pages of the first two works mentioned in our rubric, because the effect contemplated by M. Comte in his proposed regeneration of a social system, alleged to be effete, is therein exhibited in miniature in his own language, and a faint foreshadowing is thus afforded of the scheme about to be advocated by him. We have not even omitted the mottoes and devices, although their explanation and development must be sought in the body of the treatises; for those constitute the most significant part of the brief programme, and form the phylacteries which he has bound around the brows of his renovated and depurated Humanity. These apophthegms of Positivism furnish a consistent vestibule to the interior of the temple, and prepare us beforehand for that heterogeneous jumble of profound thought, of sagacious morality, and of eccentric hallucination, which encompass us on all sides as soon as we penetrate into the mysteries of the fane. They beckon our fancies onward from the dry precision and phenomenal abstractions of the Positive Philosophy, and invite them to regions smiling beneath a less rarified and artificial atmosphere, where the natural play of human instincts, and the spontaneous ebullitions of human feeling are no longer to be confined in the void of an exhausted receiver. Adhering by the watchword of "Order and Progress," to the spirit and conclusions of his scientific investigation, M. Comte points us by his other countersigns to the mysticism of sentimental reverie, and gives an unchecked rein to the frenzy of the imagination, by proposing to "reorganize without a God, as without a king, the institutions of society, by the sole and systematic worship of Humanity itself." But, in this attempt to regulate the functions of the moral universe, and to circle around the great globe of human action, it is Phaethon who has abandoned his natural foothold upon earth-not Apollo, who has descended from heaven, to mount the chariot of the sun, and guide the fiery coursers of light around the orbit of the world. M. Comte has assumed task beyond his powers; but, in arrogating to himself the work of a God, he has strangely divested himself of the more earthly and human attributes of his previous philosophy.

The wide discrepance between his earlier and his later labours

between the Positive Philosophy and the Positive Politics, with its Introduction and Appendix-is startling in a mind of such logical texture as belongs to M. Comte. With singular steadiness and sobriety he had pursued, in the Cours de Philosophie Positive, an undeviating train of thought through the long succession of the sciences; and had maintained, with scarcely any perceptible faltering, the same harmony of development, the same logical coherence, (or solidarité, to borrow the recent and convenient French phrase,) even in the elaborate creation of that new science which he had sketched in such grand and masterly outlines, as the climax of his own labours, and the crown of all human research. But, with human frailty, he relaxes his grasp on the thread which had guided him through the labyrinths of scientific speculation, at the very moment when he proclaims that his system is definitely established, and projects the reorganization of society on the basis of his scheme. This discrepance may, perhaps, be due to the customary incompatibility of the philosopher and the man of practical prudence; or it may be more appropriately detected in the narrowness and insufficiency of his original premises, which compelled him to exclude from all recognition the overruling dominion of Him by whom "princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth;" whose hand planted the foundations, and sustains the fabric of society, no less than it "hung the round globe upon nothing;" and whose wisdom "set his laws upon the great deep, that it should not pass his commandment." This exclusion-a foregone conclusion, by the way, and therefore in dereliction of the fundamental principles of the Positive Philosophy-necessitated also the negation of all those vital and indefinable links by which God has chained his creatures to himself; and it has predetermined the repudiation of all knowledge, and the rejection of all doctrine, which may not be embraced within the limited sphere of strict science. But its own penalty waits upon the sin, and has in the present instance manifestly overtaken it. M. Comte's procedure had left the future development of his system without a support, at the very time when the immense theory, which had been so carefully evolved, was to be transferred from the pliant realms of speculative analysis to the complex and intractable realities of practical construction. The original error thus ripens at length into fruit, and impairs the continuity of even the theoretic exposition, by refusing to yield the requisite aid for the final application of the system.

It is natural that the primitive defect should become glaringly manifest just at this crisis, and not before; for it is always in the process of transferring theory to practice that the deficiencies of the

former reveal themselves even to unreflecting minds. As long as a doctrine is confined to speculation, it is not difficult to conceal from others, as well as from ourselves, the imperfections of the material and to cover over with deceptive semblances the insecurity and weakness of the foundations; but whenever it is tested by experience, or is transmuted into a scheme for actual employment, the latent errors are instantaneously exposed. In all such cases, the difficulty of previously detecting the fallacy will be proportionate to the greater or less amount of truth with which it may be incorporated. The larger the quantity of truth, the greater will be the probability of the concomitant error escaping notice. We have already acknowledged that the Positive method is correct and available, so far as strict science is concerned; and that it is legitimately applicable to the full extent to which the subject-matter will admit of rigid, scientific coördination; and we have discovered that its radical fallacy consists in the attempt to make science universal, and to deny all other than scientific knowledge. Hence, we have no reason to be surprised that the inherent error of M. Comte's premises should manifest itself openly by a rupture of his logic only when he proceeds beyond the range of pure science to the complex details of practice.

In the commencement of the Politique Positive, M. Comte urges the importance of acknowledging the logic of instincts. Rightly and acutely, we think: we did virtually the same thing, before him, and perhaps more correctly, in the first essay of this series but the Positivist must reconcile the admission of the logic of instinct with the requisitions of a system of rigid phenomenalism. The task is not an easy one: others may conclude with us that it is impossible of achievement. But the very recognition of instinctespecially of instinct capable of subserving the functions of reasoning -appears to us the admission of a fact which cannot be harmonized with any purely phenomenal interpretation. How can this instinct and its processes be discerned? By observation and experiment? Only in a slight degree; for in this case both of these borrow the light of explanation entirely from the premonitions of individual experience. But experience differs from experiment in this important respect, that it is an act of consciousness depending upon no arbitrary and prearranged coördination of circumstances; it is intrinsic, not extrinsic; a modification suffered by the individual, not an observation of general external phenomena. To use the Kantian phrases, so loosely employed by M. Comte,-experience is subjective entirely in its character, experiment mainly objective. Without pressing against Positivism the ridicule and scorn which

are lavished in the first volume of the Philosophy, on the alleged fallacy of the phenomena of consciousness, and the impossibility of the internal observation proposed by the Scotch Psychologists,--we say that this recognition of instincts, which can be originally recognised only by consciousness, is at variance with the spirit of Posi• tivism, or of the Positive Philosophy; because every act of consciousness necessarily implies a reality behind the phenomena perceived, and a real agency or cause antecedent to the perception, and incapable of being included within the sphere of phenomenal explanation. This is the ignotum aliquid which precedes all knowledge, and all possibility of knowledge; which is more real than all the shadowy phenomena which it reflects; and which evinces the existence of the agent prior to the manifestation of the act. If we might. recur to the significant but seldom understood technicalities of early schools, we would say that the admission of the validity of the logic of instinct necessarily admits the substantiality of the natura naturans, as the previous condition, sine qua non, of the phenomenalism of the natura naturata. It is this inevitable recognition of something which we are assured by consciousness is more than a mere phenomenon, which is, in our estimation, fatal to any scheme of pure phenomenalism. It matters little that the variance may be represented as single, remote, and anterior to the formal evolutions of science: if it exists at all, it annihilates the pretensions of the system. Moreover, it appears single and slight merely because it is here presented only under one aspect, and with reference to the particular inconsistency into which M. Comte has been unavoidably betrayed. But this little discrepance, this unclosed and irremediable chasm between the two hemispheres of knowledge, scientific and practical, presents the entrance-gate for the logical introduction of all that immense but amorphous domain of knowledge which M. Comte has rejected and denied. At the same time, it brands with the mark of sophistry such previous rejection and negation. It divides Positivism, like a house divided against itself, and thus furnishes in the body of the system the irresistible solvent which must disintegrate and destroy the whole elaborate creation.

It would be sufficiently easy to give a more popular and more generally intelligible exposition of this discord between the two parts of Positivism; but we are more anxious to furnish the argument in the form which can be least impugned than in that which can be most cursorily appreciated. For the latter purpose, and for the reader unused to philosophical speculations, the proof of the inconsistency may be condensed into the statement which every one can verify by his own meditations,-that to recognise