us the one enduring thing is reason, and that man has, properly speaking, no task but to discover it and to fight for it. It is the glory of Hegel and his lasting significance in the history of thought that, in an age of great thinkers, he realised this truth more firmly and wrought it out in a more concrete form and with more unwearying patience than any of his contemporaries, or indeed than any save the two or three greatest of his forerunners. And if we ask what were his contributions to Political Philosophy in particular, the answer must be: he was the first thinker to grasp the full scope of the historical method; the first to recognise the debt of the individual conscience to the instinctive sense of the community; and the first to ground the idea of progress, not on accidental circumstances, but on the very nature of reason. Previous thinkers had fixed an impassable barrier between the moral and the political growth of man, and again between his speculative reason and his practical. It was the task of Hegel to show that both distinctions were essentially abstract and unreal. CHAPTER V COMTE WITH Hegel it might have seemed that Philosophy had passed for ever from the region of Utopias. With Comte, as indeed with St. Simon and Fourier before him, it once more returned beneath their sway. Yet there is a difference. The Utopias of the eighteenth century had made an idol of the individual; those of the nineteenth sacrifice everything to the community or the State. The earlier Utopias defied history; the later ones, that of Comte at any rate, have at least sought to build their dreams of the future upon the experience of the past. In all this the influence of Hegel, indirect though it may be, is unmistakable. Without Hegel, or rather without the ideas which found their best and fullest utterance in Hegel, the work of Comte would have been impossible. But if the Politique Positive bears witness to the penetrating influence of Hegel and his fellow workers, it also, and still more directly, reflects the reaction against the ideas of the Revolution. The theory of Hegel was in itself, no doubt, hostile in most points to those ideas; but few things are more remarkable than its almost entire freedom from reactionary alarms. In Comte, as will be seen, such alarms play no inconsiderable part. They give to a theory, in large measure parallel to that of the German thinker, a form and colour such as could hardly have presented themselves except to a Frenchman who had grown up under the terror of the great upheaval. That, in fact, is the historical importance of Comte. He is, if not the most representative, at least the deepest and the most fruitful of those political theorists who, taking alarm at the Revolution, have set themselves to stem the tide of democracy and to guide the prevailing currents of thought and action into other channels. So far, his work may be said to resemble that attempted in one way by Carlyle and in another by such writers as Coleridge and de Maistre. What distinguishes him from them is the thoroughness with which he does his task and the unflinching boldness with which he strives to free his mind from current assumptions. While they halt at a half-way house, at some chapel or barrack provided by the piety or valour of the past, he battles his way to the end of the journey, resolved not to rest on any ground that his own thought has not chosen or in any quarters that his own hands have not built. Thus, if he is the most reactionary, he is also the most revolutionary of modern writers. In that double character lies at once his personal distinction and his historical significance. It has been said that, in many respects, the theory of Comte recalls the theory of Hegel. Like Hegel, he starts, not from the individual, but from the community. Like Hegel, he rests his system on the historical method. Like Hegel, he regards the social, no less than the intellectual and spiritual, life of man as being matter of gradual and continuous development. But he is in no sense a mere French replica of Hegel. As might have been expected from so original and acute a mind, he deepens, strengthens and modifies-in some ways doubtless for the better-the lines of speculation laid down by his great forerunner. The most significant of these modifications flow, as will be seen hereafter, from a difference in his conception of man's intellect, both in itself and in its relation to the other elements of human nature. To Hegel, as has been sufficiently shown, the reason is apt to present itself as a kind of blind force, over which the individual has no control, by which he is possessed, mastered, overruled as by a higher power. The result is that not only is the individual reason in danger of losing itself in that of the community or the race, but the individual himself is emptied, or at least seems to be emptied, of all other faculties and reduced to little more than an intellectual machine. It is the lasting service of Comte both to have given the individual reason fair scope as against that of the community and to have left room, it may be more room than enough, for the play of the other faculties, in particular of love and sympathy, as against pure intellect or the instinct of logical abstraction. No doubt, the defects which Comte thus corrected, unconsciously enough, in the work of Hegel are, in some sense, more apparent than real. They belong rather to the form in which Hegel's theory is stated than to the theory itself. None the less, it is well that Comte should have freed the theory from the stiffness of its original statement and won for it, though in a shape far less satisfactory, a hearing before a wider world than the class-rooms of Jena and Berlin. Hegel has had students; Comte, with less to say and with less talent for saying it, has made disciples. The fatal flaw in the work of Comte is its want of a sound basis in speculation. It is not only that the problems of moral philosophy are left entirely untouched. That in itself would have been a grave omission; in a system which recognises so close a bond between the political and the moral life of man, it is doubly grave; and, in view of the vast space allotted to those purely scientific questions which, important as they are, have yet little or no direct bearing upon the matter in hand, it is to the last degree misleading and perverse. That, however, is not all. Large as is the place assigned to scientific questions in Comte's political theory, he makes no serious attempt to sift the speculative problems which lie at their root; and in the few passages where he touches on such matters, he betrays a confusion of mind, an inability to understand what exactly are the points at issue, which contrasts decisively with the clear-sightedness and profundity of Hegel. Hence the glaring inconsistencies between his earlier and his later work; hence it was that the man who had begun with an uncompromising attempt to apply the methods and results of natural science to the individual and collective life of man, ended with a helpless reversion to the craziest dreams and the most haphazard methods of the theologians and metaphysicians. He had rejected all metaphysics, all enquiry into the speculative grounds of action and scientific thought, as a childish delusion; he paid the penalty in the credulity with which, for want of such an enquiry, he installed the 'subjective method -and in his hands this meant the absolute negation both of the methods and the results of science-as the only method admissible in political, social and even scientific investigation. He began by proclaiming the emancipation of man from the superstitions of the past; he ended by finding salvation in a pompous travesty of the medieval Papacy. What, then, exactly is the theory of Comte, and what are the cardinal principles on which it rests? In answering these questions we must distinguish between the historical foundation laid by Comte and the fabric of theory which he raises on it. It is with the former naturally that we start. Political life, he urges, like all the other activities of man-of which indeed it is the crown and, in some sense, the summing uppasses through three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the 'positive' or scientific. In the first of these no inherent invariable law is recognised; everything is referred to the arbitrary will of a higher power or of some man, or body of men, regarded as the chosen representative of such a power. Instances of societies organised in this manner are the monarchies of primitive tribes, the theocracy of the Jews, the republic of early Rome; or, to come to later ages, the medieval Papacy and, in theory, the monarchies of Western Europe as idealised by the champions of divine right. The second stage is, in the last resort, identical with the first. Like the first, it assigns an arbitrary and irrational character to the history of the past. Like the first, it attributes the power of It modifying the 'social organism,' and consequently human nature, indefinitely to all governments, past, present and to come. differs from its predecessor only in replacing the idea of a personal god, a magnified and non-natural man,' by abstractions such as Right and Nature. No doubt the metaphysical conception, irrational as it is, marks an advance, historically speaking, upon the theological. Its mission was to break up the fabric of the past and to prepare the ground for the new building to be reared by the scientific spirit of the future. But its function is purely negative and destructive. It is powerless to construct; and, when credited with the ability to do so, it brings forth nothing but anarchy and bloodshed. As a theory, it has been the dominating influence on European thought for the last three centuries; increasingly so during the last hundred years, thanks to the Contrat Social of Rousseau. Once, and only once, has it been put unreservedly in practice, at the time of the French Revolution. The third stage, that of 'positive' conviction, differs radically from both those that have gone before it. For their arbitrary assumptions and capricious methods it substitutes the method of rigorous observation and the principle that political life, no less than nature, is regulated by discoverable law; in other words, that every element in the social body is conditioned by the rest, and that every step in its growth depends upon all the steps that have been taken before. Thus the positive spirit rejects all enquiry alike into causes, whether first or final, and into rights. It confines itself to experience; and behind experience it traces the working of laws as definite as those which govern the facts of natural science, though more subject to variation and modification. Even these modifications, however, are themselves but the expression of a general law, already observable in the ascending scale of the natural sciences and constituting, in fact, the vital principle of their classification. The lower sciences, mathematics and astronomy, are those which are the most abstract and the most general, and consequently the least subject to uncertainty or variation; while the higher sciencesphysics, chemistry and biology-just because they are the higher, show a progressive decrease in abstractness and in generality, and a corresponding increase of complexity and consequently of uncertainty and liability to variation. Hence it is in the nature of things that the laws which regulate the social life of man, the laws of sociology,' being of incomparably greater complexity, involving conditions far more intricate than those of any inferior science, should be both more difficult to discover and more exposed to modifying influences, whether of climate and soil or of human will and energy, than any other. Understanding sociological law in this sense and, as has been said, rejecting all chimerical notions such as |