PART II-SOCIOLOGY AS A STUDY OF SOCIAL PROGRESS THE DIRECTION OF SOCIAL PROGRESS

V

SOCIAL DYNAMICS; OR THEORY OF THE NATURAL PROGRESS OF HUMAN SOCIETY1

THE ORDER OF EVOLUTION

Though the elements of our social evolution are connected and always acting on each other, one must be preponderant, in order to give an impulse to the rest, though they may, in their turn, so act upon it as to cause its further expansion. We must find out this superior element, leaving the lower degrees of subordination to disclose themselves as we proceed; and we have not to search far for this element, as we cannot err in taking that which can be best conceived of apart from the rest, notwithstanding their necessary connection, while the consideration of it would enter into the study of the others. This double characteristic points out the intellectual evolution as the preponderant principle. If the intellectual point of view was the chief in our statical study of the organism, much more must it be so in the dynamical case. If our reason required at the outset the awakening and stimulating influence of the appetites, the passions, and the sentiments, not the less has human progression gone forward under its direction. It is only through the more and more marked influence of the reason over the general conduct of man and of society that the gradual march of our race has attained that

1 From The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, translated by Harriet Martineau, Vol. II, chap. vi, pp. 156–180, London and New York, 1853.

regularity and persevering continuity which distinguishes it so radically from the desultory and barren expansion of even the highest of the animal orders, which share, and with enhanced strength, the appetites, the passions, and even the primary sentiments of man. If the statical analysis of our social organism shows it resting at length upon a certain system of fundamental opinions, the gradual changes of that system must affect the successive modifications of the life of humanity; and this is why, since the birth of philosophy, the history of society has been regarded as governed by the history of the human mind. As it is necessary, in a scientific sense, to refer our historical analysis to the preponderant evolution, whatever it may be, we must in this case choose, or rather preserve, the general history of the human mind as the natural guide to all historical study of humanity. One consequence of the same principle-a consequence as rigorous but less understood - is that we must choose for consideration in this intellectual history the most general and abstract conceptions, which require the exercise of our highest faculties. Thus it is the study of the fundamental system of human opinions with regard to the whole of phenomena in short, the history of philosophy, whatever may be its character, theological, metaphysical, or positive-which must regulate our historical analysis. No other department of intellectual history, not even the history of the fine arts, including poetry, could, however important in itself, be employed for this object; because the faculties of expression, which lie nearer to the effective faculties, have always, in their palmiest days, been subordinated, in the economy of social progress, to the faculties of direct conception. The danger (which is inherent in every choice, and which is least in the choice that I have made) of losing sight of the interconnection of all the parts of human development may be partly guarded against by frequently comparing them, to see if the variations in any one corresponds with equivalent variations in the others. I believe we shall find that this confirmation is eminently obtainable by my method of historical analysis. This will be proved at once if we find that the development of the highest part of human interests is in accordance with that of the lowest,

the intellectual with the material. If there is an accordance between the two extremes, there must be also between all the intermediate terms.

We have indicated the general direction of the human evolution, its rate of progress, and its necessary order. We may now proceed at once to investigate the natural laws by which the advance of the human mind proceeds. The scientific principle of the theory appears to me to consist in the great philosophical law of the succession of the three states, the primitive theological state, the transient metaphysical, and the final positive state, through which the human mind has to pass in every kind of speculation. This seems to be the place in which we should attempt the direct estimate of this fundamental law, taking it as the basis of my historical analysis, which must itself have for its chief object to explain and expand the general notion of this law by a more and more extended and exact application of it in the review of the entire past of human history. I hope that the frequent statement and application of this law throughout the preceding part of my work will enable me to condense my demonstration of it here, without impairing its distinctness or injuring its efficacy in such ulterior use as we shall have to make of it.

LAW OF THE THREE PERIODS

The reader is by this time abundantly familiar with the interpretation and destination of the law. All thoughtful persons can verify for themselves its operation in individual development, from infancy to manhood, as I pointed out at the beginning of this work. We can test it, as we have tested other laws, by observation, experiment, and comparison. I have done so through many years of meditation, and I do not hesitate to say that all these methods of investigation will be found to concur in the complete establishment of this historical proposition, which I maintain to be as fully demonstrated as any other law admitted into any other department of natural philosophy. Since the discovery of this law of the three periods, all positive philosophers have agreed on its special adaptation to the particular science in

which each was interested, though all have not made the avowal with equal openness. The only objections that I have encountered have related merely to the universality of its application. I hold it to be now implicitly recognized with regard to all the sciences which are positive; that is, the triple evolution is admitted in regard to all cases in which it is accomplished. It is only in regard to social science that its application is supposed to be impossible; and I believe the objection to signify nothing more than that the evolution is in this case incomplete. Social science has, with all its complexity, passed through the theological state, and has almost everywhere fully attained the metaphysical; while it has nowhere yet risen to the positive, except in this book. I shall leave the assertion of the law in regard to sociology to the demonstration which my analysis will afford, for those who cannot perceive in this volume, as a whole, the nascent realization of this last philosophical process could not be convinced by argument. Leaving the historical verification of the law, therefore, to the reader, I invite attention to its philosophical explanation. It is not enough that the succession of the three states is a general fact. Such generality would go for more in any other science than in sociology, because, as we have seen, our biological philosophy enables us to conceive of all the main relations of social phenomena a priori, independently of their direct investigation, and we need confirmation of our conceptions by direct knowledge of human nature and experience. An a priori conception of a law so important as this is of the deepest interest in the study of social dynamics; and, to confirm it, we must carefully mark the general grounds, derived from an exact knowledge, which have rendered indispensable on the one hand, and inevitable on the other, that succession of social phenomena which take their course under the operation of this law. The logical grounds have already been assigned at the outset of the work, and repeatedly since; and it is with the moral and social that we now have to do, and we can review them without subjecting ourselves to the reproach of severing the parts of a philosophical demonstration, which are in their nature bound up together and therefore inseparable.

THE THEOLOGICAL PERIOD

The necessity of the intellectual evolution I assert lies in the primary tendency of man to transfer the sense of his own nature into the radical explanation of all phenomena whatever. Philosophers tell us of the fundamental difficulty of knowing ourselves; but this is a remark which could not have been made till human reason had achieved a considerable advance. The mind must have attained to a refined state of meditation before it could be astonished at its own acts,-reflecting upon itself a speculative activity which must be at first incited by the external world. If, on the one hand, man must begin by supposing himself the center of all things, he must, on the other hand, next set himself up as a universal type. The only way that he can explain any phenomena is by likening them, as much as possible, to his own acts, -the only ones whose mode of production he can suppose himself, by the accompanying sensations, to understand. We may therefore set up a converse statement and say that man knows nothing but himself; and thus his philosophy, in his earliest stage, consists principally in transferring this spontaneous unity, more or less fortunately, into all subjects which may present themselves to his nascent attention. It is the highest proof of his philosophical maturity when he can, at length, apply the study of external nature to his own. When I laid this down as the basis of biological philosophy I intimated the extreme rarity of such an attainment. At the outset, under the inverse process, the universe is always subordinated to man in speculative as well as in active respects. We shall not have attained a truly rational position till we can reconcile these two great philosophical views, at present antagonistic, but admitting of being made mutually complementary, and, in my opinion, prepared for being so from this time forward. Such a harmony is even now barely conceivable in the brightest insight of philosophical genius, and there could have been no choice between the two courses in the earliest days of human development. The starting point must have been that which alone was naturally possible. This was the spontaneous origin of the theological philosophy, the elementary