STACK. 5 072 845 UGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM | AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE CHURCH OF HUMANITY, CHAPEL STREET, HOLBORN, of California L Regional Facility BY FBEDEEICK J. GOULD One Penny 13 WATTS & CO., 17 JOHNSON'S COUET, FLEET STREET, E.G. 1916 All are welcome to our meetings at the Church of Humanity, 19 Chapel Street, Lamb's Conduit Street, Holborn, London, W.C. The current announcements may be had from the Secre- tary of the London Positivist Society, Mr. Paul Descours, 65 Deauville Road, Clapham Park, London, S.W. AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM POSITIVISM, as an organized expression of the heart, * the reflections, and the character of man, arose in France. It might conceivably have arisen in Asia and indeed we know that in the soul of Asia there are noble elements which prepare the way for the acceptance of the Keligion of Humanity by Japan, China, India, Persia, Arabia. But Asia was too solid and too static. The governing idea of the world-wide federation of republics must arise in Europe. It must arise in the region of the Mediterranean, which is the key of modern civilization. A chain of living fires had to leap across the Mediterranean waters, from ancient Egypt to the island of Crete and its Minoan- people, to Sicily and its vineyards, to Greece and its olive groves, to Home and its Caesars and its Popes. And since Italy was too much given over to theology, priests, monks, and subtle schoolmen, the living fire of creative thought must pass the Alps, and find a hearth and a shrine in the South of France, in the city of Mont- pellier, not far from the land of the joyous, human, and companionable poets, the Troubadours; not far from the home of Chevalier Bayard, the Catholic knight " without fear and without reproach"; not far from the Spain which produced the sanity and wit of Cervantes ; and not too far off the island which bore Alfred, Cromwell, and Milton, and whose people carried the sacred fire to America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and met the representatives of a very ancient social order at Surat, Bombay, and Calcutta. So at Montpellier the Founder of Positivism was born in 1798, between Latin Italy, Latin Spain, and the sea-going English, founders of many commonwealths. He was born of Catholic parents Louis and Rosalie Comte and, while yet a youth, moved from the south to the north of France, to Paris, the centre of the modern Revolution, Republicanism, and Humanist 3 2107622 4 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM Freedom. As a son of France, of the very West of the West, he was the inevitable messenger of the grand doctrine of civilization, the Unity of Man. Man, oh not men ! a chain of linked thought Of love and might to be divided not, Compelling the elements with adamantine stress Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea. How can we, disciples of the Keligion of Love, Order, and Progress, be otherwise than glad and proud that in the three tragical and critical years of the European War the British and Irish people, and their oversea kin, should be conjoined with Comte's countrymen, and battling for an International cause on French soil ? The genius of France, shaping itself through the Catholic Ages, through Montaigne, Descartes, St. Vincent de Paul, Moliere, Bossuet, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, Richelieu, Colbert, Turgot, Danton, came to a splendid fullness in Comte, and expressed the one effective, final idea for building a new world out of the materials of the world now passing in this war. To the outer view, Auguste Comte's career was not eventful. The short-sighted lecturer, clad in black, much given to pacing the midnight streets of Paris in deep meditation ; the industrious tutor and examiner ; unhappy in marriage, happy in the friendship of Clotilde de Vaux, affectionately served by the household care of Sophie Bliot ; a thinker, almost solitary, esteemed by a few groups of far-seeing people in France, England, Holland, United States that is Comte, for the man who wants to understand his world in easy paragraphs. But what was the essential Comte ? To those who climb above the region of small anecdotes and popular lectures, and Huxley's epigrams, and chatty notes in " Literary Supplements," and reach the place where the AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM 5 Inward Eye sees the vast procession of spirits who make civilization what was Comte ? I should say that Comte was, above all, an interpreter ; one who could unroll the record of man, and show us just those pictures in the record which tell the progress of fellowship, of ideas, of courageous and healthy action. It is the simple truth to say that Comte was the greatest of all appreciators ; that is, he, first of all men, taught us to appreciate and venerate every stage of human history Primitive, Barbaric, Greek, Koman, Catholic, Revo- lutionary, Modern, and even the Future. Now anybody the weakest and basest can appreciate something or other, here or there, in human life. A little love, or a little passion, or a little fancy, will appreciate some trifle or some allurement for a fleeting moment. But to appreciate the whole story of man, to appreciate humanity, is the highest act of religion. Reflective minds who preceded Comte tried to see the course of the human drama, but their vision failed ; they had to close it with a colossal battle of Armageddon or judgment-day. Or they would see a record with horrid gaps in it a beautiful period of Greek art and Greek science and Roman virtue, followed by a Dark Age of Christian superstition, with nothing to light the fog till Voltaire began to say witty things about Church and Bible. Comte invited civilization to know its own strength, and to perceive the greatness of its ancestry all the way down the ages. The Catholic Age the age represented by Notre Dame at Paris, or Stoke Poges church, or the Canterbury Pilgrims, or Dante's dream of Purgatory and Paradise, or the devotion of Joan of Arc was as admirable to him as the age of Aristotle and Caesar. He detected the golden thread that ran through them all. He found values in all. Superficial persons call this attitude optimism that is, a tendency to hope for the best. Other persons, assuming to be wiser, call it meliorism, or a tendency to hope for gradual improvement. To Comte I think such discussions would 6 AUGUSTS COMTE AND POSITIVISM be mere chatter. To him Humanity was the Great Being, growing from primitive childhood to adulthood. It was a life that grew, expanded, and, in spite of its errors, diseases, self-contradictions (which we call disputes and wars), was lovable and sociable. The cheerfulness that Positivism gives is not the expectant feeling which looks from a window on a stormy day and hopes for better weather, or the best weather. It is a cheerfulness that has read history, and learned to appreciate the humanity there mirrored. It is the cheerfulness that accepts life and co-operates with life. This is another way of saying that to love and serve mankind is the mark of health and sanity. Hence it is that, of all religious writings, the works of Comte are the most wholesome in tone, the most reasonable in judgment, the most free from lamentation or contempt, the most happy and rich in praise of good women and good men of all times and places. So that if a wayfarer chances to come into our Positivist meeting-room, and supposes that our busts of Julius Caesar, S. Paul, Shakespeare, and the rest, signify a little group of elect heroes, desperately picked out from a wicked or foolish world, we have to assure him that this is not at all the case. Bather we have to assure him that our first and deepest appreciation is for the uncounted millions of plain, everyday people in very ordinary homes and very ordinary conditions. In their hearts are the Christ, the Messiah, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, the Wonderful, the Saviour, the Mother of Consolation, and the Morning Star ; not there, indeed, in conscious fullness, but waiting and wrestling for expression. And these heroic types Caosars, Pauls, Shakespeares which Comte arranged in his noble Calendar, are but the privileged interpreters of the innumerable common hearts. Now Comte, in his early manhood, caught the vision of this Humanity. Europe had just come through the tempest of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, just as, a century later, we ourselves shall emerge AUGUSTS COMTE AND POSITIVISM 7 from another European tempest. But whereas now (thanks largely to him) multitudes of disciplined thinkers are meditating over the problem of reconstruction, at that period Comte was practically alone in his painful work of foresight and world-planning. As a young man, between the ages of twenty and thirty, he revolved the question, " Since Humanity, and only Humanity, is henceforward to be the true inspiration and object of service, however much the Gods and Moral Catchwords may seem to dominate, how is this new religious view to be com- mended to the world, and how are we to make sure that the new enthusiasm shall not be a mere sentimentalism ? " Anybody who reads the essays which he wrote between the years 1819 and 1828 that " After-the-war " period, as we should say to-day can see that this was the question that profoundly seized upon him. This was what he thought about in his solitary walks, and what he must often have discussed with his friends. In England, at that time, some of our fathers, being bent on cheap marketing and cheap thinking, hoped to meet the after- war problems with the easy evangelical doctrine of laying burdens at the foot of the Cross and preaching moral maxims. Some of their descendants to-day, when Europe is struggling in agony with racial and social difficulties, are attempting similar easy and equally lazy solutions; and they hope, by pronouncing maxims against war and hatred, to still the tempest among nations. Neither by sweet maxims, nor by standing aloof in a scowling minority, nor by devoted ambulance work, can the inter- national wars and confusions, and the economic wars and confusions, of the world be remedied. What did Comte do? He tells us himself in these words : "I devoted the first half of my career to con- structing, out of the materials supplied by the sciences, a truly Positive philosophy, this being the only possible basis of a universal religion." His philosophic thoughts were printed, in volume after volume, from 1830 to 1842. 8 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM Whatever was then known m mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and (as he began to call it) sociology he set out, in substance, in that long scientific discourse. In other words, he set out, in clear, serious, painstaking words, whatever man knew of external nature, and of the nature of his mind, and the facts of his own history from savage days to the French Kevolution. Years afterwards he published the splendid maxim, " Act from affection, and think in order to act." The thinking is here writ in six laborious volumes. And our answer to the people who hope to mould the great, passionate world by their cheap moral preachments and superior prophetic airs is this : " It is perfectly right to wish to change an anarchic world into a fraternal order and a theatre of happy progress ; but they who stand in the teacher's pulpit must purchase the honour by the study of man and nature; only in the sweat of our spiritual face can we eat spiritual bread ; and the maxim of love must be the crown, and not the substitute, of thought." The second half of Comte's work was never finished. He planned a religious and social programme, for which his scientific study had made preparation. In the first volume of his Positive Politics he spoke of the Mother as the symbol of humanity. In the last volume he spoke of the child in her arms that is, of " the future of man." Then, in prophetic resolution, his imagination travelled forward in 1858 he would issue a work on logic, showing how the sublime process of reasoning began in the heart itself; in 1859 a work on education, which woman should always initiate and the philosopher conclude ; in 1861 a work on industry, showing how humanity created wealth from the soil of her planet, the earth But he died on September 5, 1857, little dreaming, in his last dreams, that the Germans would capture his beloved Paris fourteen years later ; and that, nearly a half-century later still, another German inroad on his AUGUSTS COMTE AND POSITIVISM 9 beloved France would be stemmed by comrade armies of French and British. He would not weep if now he could see the devasta- tion of France and of Europe. He would say : " Courage, my friends ; and continue that sacred politics which originated in the first faint motion of love in the soul of humanity long ages ago ; with my dying breath, I gave you the key-words of the plan Woman, Education, Industry." And these are three essential ideas in Comte's recon- struction. It should be observed that all three represent great reservoirs of force as yet very inadequately drawn upon. At the present time the thought which weighs upon those who study reconstruction after the war is that of the avoidance of waste. We constantly repeat : " We must organize more efficiently." When Comte spoke of the " anarchy " of the West, what was this but another name for waste? What, again, does our doctrine of Humanity mean but the doctrine of a magnificent human power which is always producing fresh manifestations ? Whereas the ancient God was "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever." Humanity never ceases to unfold capacities and genius. This fact, indeed, has always been the real basis of the hope of prophets and visionaries, though they were not always aware of the ground of their own faith. Comte fastened upon these three sources of health and progress because they were to impart a stimulus which the old order of theology, monarchy, capitalism, could not generate. It would be extremely easy to dispute about woman suffrage, woman as a wage earner, and the rest ; and to miss the central fact that a vast treasury of moral and intellectual power yet lies latent in the world's woman- hood, restrained by our economics, our politics, our schools and creeds. But to say that womanhood needs more liberty does not describe the modern situation. People talk of liberty as if it were a hound yelping to be set free from a 10 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM kennel ; and, perhaps, that is all it often is. If we are to talk of liberty for woman, let us rather conceive of it as the dynamic in a silent and mighty stream which moves towards an electric-power station, there to be transmuted, not into a mere noisy waterfall, but into the innumerable lights that illumine a hundred villages and towns all down the valley. There you behold the release of a hidden power, but without din and racket. Nor should we mean that woman is to work more. A class of idle women does indeed exist, and may be wholesomely ordered into the ranks of industry. The everyday woman, however, works far too hard in the physical and material sense. But we should mean that in the Positive social order womanhood will be encouraged to infuse humaner feeling into politics and administration, industry and trade, a homely common- sense and considerateness into our village-planning and town-planning, and a religious value into education. These are not influences that you can define or make a syllabus of. Once our civilization shows the receptive mood, and resolves that the era of feminine presidency over social life and manners has arrived, the evolution will duly reveal itself in our institutions and our citizenship. So again with education. We hear many discussions about education, as if the main thing to be done was to insert more science into our time-table, or more lessons in Russian for purposes of commercial correspondence; and very likely these changes are called for. But the most important consideration is the enormous, and hitherto wasted, amount of ability and genius stored in the souls of the children of all nations. What we see realized in our social action and inventions and develop- ments is, I suspect, not a hundredth part of what might be realized if we gave the young human nature its proper place in the sun. Comte apprehended this vital truth long ago and framed a scheme, which even now appears Utopian, for the education of youth, up to the age of A 000 120 196 1 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSlTivib.u JL A twenty-one. Since his hand ceased to write, the nations have slowly, and in reluctant piecemeal efforts, built schools for proletarian children up to the age of fourteen, and are there halting in puzzled meditation, and wonder- ing if any further steps ought to be taken in the interest of the farmer, the manufacturing chemist, and the merchant. To Comte " all life " was " an act of worship," and the work of education by women, and by the most highly trained philosophers, was one of the highest forms of worship, because it aided the unfolding of the sacred soul of Humanity itself. The same thought applies to industry. When we say, as we do rightly say, that the normal destiny of man is to pursue industry, we are too apt to think of man as going on through the ages plodding at more or less monotonous tasks as the lower grades of shoe-hands or munition workers do in factories to-day. In reality, we are only on the threshold of a vast evolution. Our planet is only superficially exploited ; our machinery is yet crude ; and the tremendous ingenuities of human power in handling raw materials are but in the 'prentice stage. The Marxian Socialists were the first to warn the world, with any kind of scientific evidence, that modern industry was wasteful. But if industry is an act of religion ; if industry is the revelation of Humanity in its intelligence, its foresight, its providential care, its courage, its joy of discovery of hid treasure, its magnificent perseverance ; then the organizing of this genius, the conservation of its energies, the consecration of the workers who illustrate its wonders in agriculture, manufacture, transport, art, and imagination, carries us into a sphere far beyond economics. To the eye of religion, industry is a manifestation of a creative soul, as legends tell that the starry heaven was the manifestation of God. The greatest scenes of industrial creation are yet to be unveiled. I will only venture upon one more reflection on the work of Auguste Cointe. He was abreast of the latest ideas of his age. I do not mean that he was well-informed as to contemporary science. I mean that, as soon as any social development had declared itself, he immediately began to interpret it. The French devolution was so recent that its thunders still echoed about his cradle. He made that event the starting-point of a new era. When he constructed the Positive Calendar, he dedicated days to many who lived in his own lifetime, such as President Madison of the United States ; the air-machinist, Mont- golfier ; the philosopher Hegel, the poet Byron ; and to some who survived him, such as Rossini the musician and Wheatstone the telegraphist. In short, Comte was a man who caught, with unerring insight, the master-conception to which civilization was tending namely, that of Humanity Triumphant ; he summed up the scientific thought of his age ; he fastened upon the essentials of religion in the genius of woman- hood, the genius of education, the genius of labour ; he seized upon the latest and most vivid personalities that expressed the progress of man's soul ; he felt the breath of the future blowing from the eternal fields. And if we, in our own day and place, watchft Ulli.V appreciate, the new politics, the new enthusiasms, GQ messages of Humanity in its most recent and unfolding, we are honouring his example. Printed by Watts & Co., 17 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, London, E.G.