VII USELESS KNOWLEDGE 151 the most dangerous articles of the new religion. Even in his earlier work, the Philosophie positive,1 he had condemned sidereal astronomy as a grave scientific aberration, on the ground that the phenomena of the stellar universe appear to exert no appreciable influence on events within our solar system. Ten years later, in the first volume of the Positive Polity, he was no longer content thus to limit astronomy to a knowledge of the solar system. It should restrict itself to a knowledge of the earth, and consider the other celestial bodies only in their relation to the human planet. No doubt the ancients were deceived in believing the earth to be the centre of the world; but it is the centre of our world, and accordingly the subjective synthesis concentrates the celestial studies round the earth'. By the time he had reached the fourth volume of the Positive Polity, he was of opinion that, strictly speaking, the study of the sun and moon would suffice, although we might add to them, if so inclined, the planets of the ancients, but not the 'little telescopic planets' due to modern discovery. This is only an example of the lengths which he was prepared to go. No science, he thought, should be carried further as an abstract study than is necessary to lay the foundation for the science next above it in the hierarchy of the sciences, and so ultimately for the moral and social science in which they culminate. Any further extension of the mathematical and physical sciences should be merely 'episodic '-limited, that is to say, to what may from time to time be demanded by the requirements of industry and the arts-and should be left to the industrial classes. It was, in fact, to be one of the main functions of the spiritual power, or the priesthood of the new religion, to restrain the intellectual activity of the community from wandering at large in the fields of useless knowledge. Comte says somewhere that the Religion of 1 In the sixth volume. 2 Cf. Lévy Bruhl, Philosophy of Auguste Comte, pp. 150-2. Humanity will keep as jealous a watch as mediaeval Catholicism over the rovings of the intellect. This is not the place to enlarge on the short-sightedness of this incredibly narrow utilitarian view of knowledge— condemned, even from the utilitarian point of view itself, by the impossibility of foreseeing what researches are destined to lead to valuable applications and what are not. How often have the abstrusest and apparently most purely speculative investigations, or, again, researches into phenomena of apparently the most trivial kind, resulted in transforming our practical activities or revolutionizing our intellectual outlook on the world! Bacon, who also subordinated knowledge to practice, knew that it is 'light' not 'fruit' which we must seek in the first instance. And while no man of science will undervalue the benefits which his discoveries may confer on his fellows, it is knowledge on its own account which he first instinctively seeks; the rest, he feels, will be added, if his knowledge is true. Comte's proposal to select certain provinces as worth knowing and to leave others out of account, and to determine, moreover, with what degree of thoroughness the selected provinces are to be investigated, is so subversive of the primary faith both of science and philosophy that it comes near reducing the idea of truth to one of subjective convenience. These things are cited merely to show how the idea of stopping short with a subjective synthesis, of taking man as a world by himself, involves an arbitrariness of treatment which subtly affects Comte's whole method of procedure, and eventually makes him a traitor to the scientific spirit of which he had constituted himself the champion. Thought, in whatever sphere, cannot stop short of the idea of an order or system of the universe as a whole. LECTURE VIII POSITIVISM AND AGNOSTICISM WE traced in the preceding lecture the conflict of ideas running through Comte's speculations. What is characteristic in his philosophico-religious theory, what gives him his distinctive place in the history of thought, is the sharp initial dualism between man and nature. This leads, in his theory of knowledge, to a pure phenomenalism or subjectivism, buttressed by a polemic against metaphysics which depends upon the same residuum of bad metaphysics' that led Kant to his doctrine of the unknowable thing-in-itself. In his ethical and religious theory, it leads him to treat nature entirely as a mechanical system, an indifferent, if not a hostile power, which he therefore fitly describes as an external fatality. For although man converts this fatality to his own uses, and makes its existence the instrument of his own advance in knowledge and goodness, this is represented as entirely man's own doing, making the best of an existing situation. Nature and man are not part of one scheme of things; nature is just, as it were, a brute fact with which. man finds himself confronted. Hence man appears in the universe like a moral Melchizedek without ancestry, owing everything to himself, his own Providence, bringing into the universe for the first time the qualities which merit the attribute divine. And accordingly, the deification of man is equivalent to the dethronement of God. As Comte puts it in a notable, if somewhat blustering paradox, the heavens declare the glory, not of God, but of Kepler and Newton. Now, if we look simply at the historical process, as traceable in the evolution, say, of the solar system and of our own planet, it is undoubtedly the case that in the timesequence the authentic lineaments of the divine are recognizable for the first time in ethical man. And if we ignore the biological preparation and prefigurement—if we cut the world in two with a hatchet, as the saying is, leaving ethical man on the one hand and an external fatality on the other— then man does seem the only source and seat of the qualities which have a rightful claim upon our worship. But, when we try to think seriously, can we really suppose that before the planets cooled sufficiently to admit of organic life, the universe (and by universe I mean here the All of existence) consisted literally of nothing else but space and its inorganic contents, or that before the appearance of palaeolithic man, the good and the beautiful had no place in the nature of things. Surely these qualities are in their very nature eternal; they are not actually created by man, shaped by him out of nothing, and added henceforth to the sum of existence. It is to take the time-process too seriously—it is to take it falsely-to regard its separate parts as equally and independently real. Time, as Plato said in a fine figure, is the moving image of eternity. We are creatures of time, and in a sense it may be said with truth that we cannot comprehend the timeless; our thinking must to the end be done, whether we will it or not, in terms of time. But we can at least see that time is a continuous process, and that the nature of reality can only be revealed in the process as a whole. We must look to the end, as Aristotle said; or as Hegel put it, the truth is the Whole, the End plus the process of its becoming. It has been the fundamental contention of these lectures that the isolation or substantiation of the earlier stages of a time-process is a radical error in philosophy. Continuity of process, I have urged, is not inconsistent with the emergence of qualitative differences; we pass from one plane of experience to another. But the whole process wears the VIII THE TIME-PROCESS 155 appearance of a progressive revelation, not of a sheer addition to the life of the universe. It is impossible to get away from the conception of a natura rerum, whether we call it Nature, the Absolute, or God. And it seems impossible to apply in such a quarter the idea of actual progress or growth from less to more. I cannot believe that the feeling of this impossibility is no more than a metaphysical obsession inherited, as M. Bergson appears to imply, from the philosophical mistakes of the past. 'Creative evolution 'is, I think, an eminently fruitful idea, if applied on the phenomenal level to emphasize the living reality of the process, the idea of the future as something to be won by our own effort, the outcome of which is unforeseeable on the basis of any analysis of the past or the present. As against the ordinary idea of a predestinated course of things, and especially against the idea of a future fatally determined by the past, M. Bergson seems to me to argue with convincing force; and this gives his pages such an extraordinary freshness— the freshness and the forward impulse of life itself. But the novelty is due, surely, to the inexhaustible nature of the fountain from which we draw, not to any inconceivable birth of something out of nothing. It all strikes one as a process of communication '-to use a phrase of Green'sor, as I said already, of progressive revelation. The novelty is like that of entering a new room in the Interpreter's House, not of building out the universe into 'the intense inane'. It is novelty as it appears to us, in the time-process, but how can it be qualitatively new in ordine ad universum? How can anything come into being unless it is founded in the nature of things, that is, unless it eternally is? So that while in one sense it is true that we think to the end in terms of time, it is equally true that we cannot think any continuous process in time, we cannot think life or development (and, as Bergson says, it is only in the living being that we encounter time as a concrete reality) without |