SECOND LECTURE.

AUGUSTE COMTE'S "LAW OF THE THREE STAGES."

IN our first lecture we endeavoured to explain what Positivism is, and also what it is not. We showed what it was, both scientifically and philosophically: what its method, and to what subjects that method was applied. To-night our task is to delincate, as fully as time will permit, the laws of the human understanding, and their scientific value. The word "science" need not frighten us, especially in these days, when "science" is so much talked of. "Science," Comte truly says, and the remark has been quoted by Mr. Huxley without acknowledgment, " is always simply the continuation of the good sense of mankind. It never really creates any of the more important doctrines."

The laws of the human mind, Comte goes on to add, are two: 1. Statical. 2. Dynamical. "They are statical and dynamical according as they have reference to the invariable element in the object under consideration, or as they apply to its necessary variations." With the second law of the human mind-dynamics, or progress-we shall deal presently, when we treat in detail the "Law of the Three Stages," which shows that all our conceptions, of whatever nature, passed through three states-they were first theological or fictitious; then metaphysical or transitional; and, lastly, positive or scientific.

Let us now, as clearly as we are able, explain the statical laws of the human mind, which are three in number. "It is," says Comte, "absolutely necessary, in fact, to have

determined what are the fundamental conditions of any existence before you can pass to the consideration of the different states in which that existence successively appears. The ancients, seeing, as they did, no tendency to change anywhere, were completely without any dynamical conceptions, even in mathematics. Whereas, Aristotle, the eternal prince of all true philosophers, was able then to lay down the laws essential for the study of all the highest branches of knowledge, life, intellect, and society, so far as such study was statical. Such is the necessary course of things; the statical must precede the dynamical, but it is incomplete without the dynamical. A merely statical appreciation can never be anything but provisional; it cannot form a competent guide for action. If it stood alone, it would lead us in action into serious errors, especially in the more important

cases.

"The statical law of our understanding is, in Positivism, simply an application of that fundamental principle of the system which looks on man as in all cases subordinate to the world. In fact, it consists in the constant subordination of our subjective constructions to the objective materials of those constructions. (This is the fourth law of the First Philosophy.) The genius of Aristotle sketched it in outline in his admirable general statement: There is nothing in the understanding that did not originally spring from sensation. The moderns often pressed this axiom too far. They represented our intelligence as purely passive. This compelled the great Leibnitz to add an essential restriction. The object of that restriction was definitely to express the spontaneous character of our mental dispositions. Leibnitz's addition, "except the understanding," limited in reality to the clearer development of Aristotle's maxim, was completed by Kant. Kant introduced the distinction, never to be forgotten, between objective and subjective reality, both equally applicable to all man's conceptions. Still, the principle had not received its full systematic value. Positivism gave it that by connecting it with the general law, which, in all vital phenomena, considers every organism as in a constant dependence on the sum of external influences. With regard to our highest spiritual functions, equally as with regard to our most corporeal ones, the external world serves us both for nourishment, stimulus and control. So viewed, the subordination of the subjective to the objective no longer stands isolated, and, at the same time, Positive

Philosophy supplies its necessary complement, without which the study, from the statical point of view, of our intellect, could not have been brought into really close connection with the dynamical. The complement, I mean, consists in recognising the fact that, in the normal state, our subjective constructions are always less vivid and less clear than the objective impressions from which they arise. (This is the fifth law of the First Philosophy.) Were it otherwise, the world without could exert no controlling influence over the world within.

"Carry out," Comte continues, "these two statical principles, and you see that all our conceptions whatever are the necessary result of an uninterrupted intercourse between the world and man-the world supplying the materials, man shaping them. They are deeply stamped with the relative character, relative both to the subject and object. As these vary respectively, so necessarily are the conceptions modified. Our great merit, in the scientific point of view, consists in bringing this natural subordination of man to the world to the highest point of perfection. At this point the brain becomes a faithful mirror of the actual order of outward things, and the future consequences of that order then admit of prevision, if the powers of the mind are rightly exercised. But the representation of the outward order is not, and is not required to be, absolutely exact. The degree in which it approximates to perfect exactness is determined by our practical wants. They give us the standard of precision desirable for our theoretical previsions. Within this necessary limit there is generally left for our intellect a certain degree of liberty in speculation. This liberty it should use to secure adequate satisfaction for its own inclinations, whether in the direction of science or even of the fine arts. This it may do by giving to our conceptions greater regularity, greater beauty even, without in any degree interfering with their truth. Such is, under its mental aspect, Positivism. It is always occupied with the pursuit of laws. It holds its way between two paths of equal danger-that of mysticism, which insists on arriving at causes; that of empiricism, which insists on a rigid adherence to these facts."

We now pass from the consideration of the statical laws of the human mind to the dynamical. It has been shown how the human mind depends on the external order, to which it is in subordination for "nourishment, stimulus, and

control." We shall now see how man first regarded that order, and through what great changes his notions and conceptions of it subsequently pass. We shall find that, as his knowledge and experience grow, he gets further and further away from his original simple mode of viewing the world, until at last he almost sees a new world to that seen by primæval man. For the world which is about us is not the same world our first ancestors saw. It has undergone revolutions so many and so great that it is, to all intents and purposes, a different world. In these revolutions are included the changes which man himself has wrought in it; changes too great to be apprehended, save approximately. It is only after much study of, and reflection upon, the evidences which the earth itself supplies, from pre-historic times downwards, that we are able faintly to image to ourselves how astounding these changes are. They are truly marvellous. Nothing but the efforts of thousands of generations of men successively engaged, unhasting yet unresting, could have brought them about. It is simple fact to assert that the earth has been transformed by man, so laboriously has he worked in it, so much have his labours altered and improved it. By clearing forests and draining swamps and bogs, he has effected a change even in its atmospheric conditions. By the domestication of animals and plants, the fauna and flora have ceased to be what they were in primæval times, and become almost new creations. There is no part of the habitable globe that has escaped man's regenerating or destroying power.

Not only has man's milieu changed, but he himself has changed with it, and almost to the same extent. We know, or at least we can estimate it, what a difference there is between a civilised man and a savage; but we do not know, and can only feebly guess, how much difference for good and evil there must be between that savage and primitive man. Civilisation is of slow growth. It is made up, as we know, of innumerable minute differences, which have been handed down from father to son for countless generations. The sum of these differences, like the sum of infinitesimals, tells in a long course of ages, making integers, the value of which is obvious to all minds.

We said that man has changed with his milieu. What is the law of that change? Comte has revealed it in his “Law of the Three Stages." This law shows that all our concep

tions, of whatever nature, have passed through three successive states: "The first is Theological or Fictitious; the second is Metaphysical or Abstract; the third (and final) is Positive or Real. The first is always provisional; the second simply transitional; the third alone is definitive."* Human progress is summed up in these three terms. Once understand their meaning and connection, and all history ceases to be a riddle; for we see that human phenomena are as much the subject of law as physical phenomena are. The reason why this truth has not been earlier recognised, save by a few here and there, is that sociological phenomena are vastly more complex than cosmological. Physics, or natural philosophy, made little or no progress until the seventeenth century, when Galileo, Newton, and Kepler discovered, inductively, laws of motion. If physics could not be perfected as a science before its dynamical laws were discovered and established, it follows, d fortiori, that sociology (the statical part of which had been treated by the great Aristotle) could not be considered as a science before Comte formulated the laws of human dynamics, or progress. The most complex of all the sciences could not be completed until the less (or least) complex was completed, for reasons which we shall state subsequently. Further, we shall find that the prejudices and ignorance which fettered and hampered the growth and development of the physical sciences are both more inveterate as well as greater where social science is concerned. No one denies the rule of law in the external order; thousands deny such a rule in the human order. Theological prepossessions hinder people from believing the one, as they formerly hindered people from believing the other. Theologism is in its last stronghold; when it gives up this, it has nothing left worth fighting for. It will die hard; its struggles to keep alive are already pitiful to watch. But now for the first of our three terms: What is Fetichism?

Fetichism is the ascription of life and intelligence essentially analogous to our own to every existing object, of whatever kind, whether organic or inorganic, natural or artificial. (M. Auguste Comte's "Philosophie Positive," tome i, and "Politique Positive," tome iii.) The word

J. S. Mill has called these three stages the Volitional, Abstractional, and Experimental-terms, to our mind, not so expressive as Comte's own selection.

“Fetichism” was, we believe, first used in philosophical discussions by President De Brosses. The Portuguese called the objects worshipped by the negroes of Africa " fetisso;" hence the Latin word "factitious" (something made). Mr. Grote ("History of Greece," vol. v., p. 22), in reference to Xerxes scourging the Hellespont which had destroyed his bridge, remarks that the absurdity and childishness of the proceeding is no reason for rejecting it as having actually taken place. "To transfer," continues he, "to inanimate objects the sensitive, as well as the willing and designing, attributes of human beings is among the early and widespread instincts of mankind, and one of the primitive forms of religion; and although the enlargement of reason and experience gradually displaces this elementary Fetichism, and banishes it from the regions of reality into those of conventional fictions, yet the force of momentary passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and even an intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of agonising pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from which he has suffered......Dr. Reid was of opinion that children naturally believed all things around them to be alive: a belief which is encouraged by the education of the nursery. And when, under the smarting of pain, we kick or strike the inanimate object which is the occasion of it, we do so, he thought, by a momentary relapse into the creed of infancy and childhood."

Now, Fetichism is the first phase of Theologism, and is universal. In it man interprets nature through feeling, for he can do no other. The interpretation satisfies his nascent speculative wants, which are few. Travellers often bear testimony to the inability of Fetich worshippers to think much; when asked a few questions as to the origin of themselves or the world, the question not only tires, but gives them the headache, as they naïvely complain. Concrete objects they know, but not abstractions of them. Hence the figurative nature of Fetichist poetry. To reason from abstractions is possible only to advanced minds scien-tifically trained, and to these not long; and Fetichism, like all Theologism, is essentially unscientific.

As man's first synthesis was purely subjective, being founded entirely upon feeling, it has been called by Comte the "Logic of Feeling." In it man and the world were at one through feeling. Thus it was that man peopled and personified all natural phenomena. Some hypothesis he