LECTURE VII

ETHICAL MAN. THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY

THE last lecture elaborated the contention that man is to be taken as organic to the world, and his experience, therefore, in all its reaches, as a process by which the true nature of reality communicates itself to him. The terror of the subjective, as M. Fouillée happily puts it, is an obsession introduced into philosophy by Kant. If it was not exactly 'introduced' by Kant, it was certainly intensified by his method of statement. I attempted to show the inherent absurdity of the position that, because knowledge is the result of a process, the truth of its report is thereby invalidated. Because, in order to be known, things must appear to the knowing subject, it surely does not follow, as Kant seems naïvely to assume, that they appear as they are not. Yet it is due to this presupposition that the relation between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon becomes the negative one of contrast or difference, and forms the fundamental opposition on which the Kantian system is based.1 On the view I have advocated, the relation between reality and appearance is not this negative relation of contrast or difference; the thing really does appear, or, in other words, reveal its nature. The thing as it is and the thing as it appears are, in principle, the same fact differently named, because looked at in different aspects. They may be intelligibly contrasted in so far as our knowledge is partial and does not therefore exhaust the nature of the object in question,

1 As Hegel wittily puts it, Kant holds that what we think is false, because it is we who think it (Encyclopädie, section 60, Wallace's translation, p. 119).

but not in the Kantian and agnostic sense that, even as regards the part we know, the thing would look quite different if, per impossibile, we could see it as it really is. The whole conception of reality as meaning existence apart from being known, and the accompanying theory of truth as lying in the correspondence of knowledge with what is by definition unknowable-this whole conception, with the agnosticism inherent in its very statement, is swept away by the view which I have been urging. That view abolishes the thing-in-itself in the Kantian sense; or, if the term is retained, it teaches that the reality of the thing is not the thing apart from knowledge, but the thing conceived as completely known, the thing as it would appear in its complete setting to a perfect intelligence. Mind is thus no more condemned, as it were, to circle round the circumference of the real world, put off with outside shows, and unable to penetrate to its essential core. Mind is set in the heart of the world; it is itself the centre in which the essential nature of the whole reveals itself.

So far we have treated the question of man's organic relation to the world with almost exclusive reference to his cognitive experience of the external world. That is the connexion in which the question arises in modern philosophy, and it had to be first disposed of, for the reason stated at the beginning of the last lecture. If man's knowledge, I said, does not put him in touch with reality, how can his ideals be supposed to furnish a clue? In the concluding pages of the lecture we applied the principle of organic relation to the aesthetic aspects of our experience. But it is, as we have seen throughout, between man's nature as an ethical being and what is taken to be the completely non-moral nature of the world from which he springs, that the cleavage, the apparent break of continuity, has usually been most keenly felt. I have already referred to Huxley's passionate indictment of cosmic nature' as not only no

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school of virtue but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature'. Man is thus, in his moral nature, so far from being organic to the universe that, in such a view, his noblest qualities are a reversal of all its ways. Man is at odds with the cosmos: it is open war between them. 'Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.' With this characteristic call to arms the deeply-felt address concludes.1

A similar sense of dualism, and even of conflict, between ethical man and cosmic nature underlies the Religion of Humanity as formulated by Comte. In this respect the Religion of Humanity is one of the most characteristic products of the nineteenth century. It is an ethical and religious idealism of a lofty type; but it is an idealism manqué an idealism truncated and imperfect—because infected by the agnostic relativism which we have seen to be characteristic of the period. There are many parallels between Comte and Kant, both in the positive and the negative aspects of their work, although Comte knew his German predecessor only at second-hand and reached his own conclusions independently. To both the moral is the foundation of intrinsic value, and both make the moral development of mankind the central point of reference in their systems. And, again, the doctrine of the phenomenality or relativity of knowledge drives a wedge deep into the philosophy of both. If Kant in some degree extricates himself from his dualism, or at least shows others a way out, Comte's religious philosophy remains to the end, what he explicitly designates it, a 'subjective synthesis'—a synthesis of humanity, that is to say, which leaves the rest of the universe out of account. An attempt to disentangle the true and the false in Comte's statement of the

1 Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics, 1893.

philosophical and religious position will prove, I think, as instructive a method as we could adopt of carrying our own argument to its conclusion and illuminating the nature of the position to which the preceding lectures have been leading up. There is, besides, so much that is true and valuable in Comte's ideas that I am not unwilling to dwell for a little on a system of thought which has perhaps been treated by constructive thinkers in this country too exclusively in its negative aspects.

The negative element in Comte's philosophy connects itself with his famous law of the three stages' of human thought. Man begins by explaining events as the results of volitions like his own; this is the theological stage of thought, leading from Fetishism through Polytheism to Monotheism. When the insight into the uniformity of nature's processes makes the resort to interfering wills unmeaning, theology is supplanted by metaphysics, which finds the causal explanation of events in essences or powers, conceived as real entities behind and separate from the phenomena which they dominate. Such an essence, power, or faculty, is so manifestly just the duplicate of the phenomenon which it is invoked to explain, that it might be difficult to understand how such pure abstractions came to be substantiated, if we did not remember that the metaphysical stage was preceded by the theological. The essence is the ghost or residuum of the spirit which was formerly believed to control the fact. As Mill puts it, the realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a word, but the gradual disembodiment of a fetish'.1 The metaphysical stage is thus essentially transitional and yields place in the fullness of time to the third, the positive or purely scientific stage. Here thought gives up the search after transcendent causes, and limits itself to investigating the laws of phenomena, that is to say, the 1 Auguste Comte and Positivism, p. 18.

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relations of resemblance, co-existence and sequence which obtain between different natural facts. Such a knowledge enables us to foresee the course of phenomena: voir pour prévoir is the motto of science. Foresight means the possibility of controlling the course of phenomena or, at least, of adapting our conduct to what we cannot change. And, as Comte strongly holds, science realizes its true function in the service of human life. With the spread of the positive or truly scientific spirit, theological and metaphysical debates will die a natural death, without the need of any explicit demonstration of the unreality of the conceptions on which they are based.

It is a fundamental tenet, therefore, of the Positivist philosophy that our knowledge is only of phenomena and their laws. Comte also uses the term relative to describe the nature of his position, referring with approbation to Kant's distinction of the subjective and objective elements in knowledge. Although we can eliminate the subjective peculiarities which belong to us as individuals, we cannot rise above the subjectivity which is common to our species as a whole; and, accordingly, 'our conceptions can never attain to a pure objectivity. It is therefore as impossible as it is useless to determine exactly the respective contributions of the internal and the external in the production of knowledge.'1

The criticism which I would offer of this position is, in sum, that it conveys a false idea of what metaphysics consists in, and that it depends itself upon the false idea which it repudiates. Comte adopts the view of the ordinary empiricist that the metaphysician or the transcendental philosopher is ceaselessly employed in the quest or elaboration of transcendent noumena, which are really duplicates of the facts to be explained. There have been, doubtless, historical examples of such a procedure-to be treated as 1 Positive Polity, vol. ii, p. 30 (English translation).