next up previous contents
Next: V Up: The Source of the Previous: III   Contents

IV

This is not the place to speak at length of the conquests of nature associated with these names. We are only concerned with the general spirit of exuberance which they engendered, with the feeling which they created that there were no limits to the powers of the human mind and to the extent to which man could hope to harness and control all the forces which so far had threatened and intimidated him. Nothing perhaps expresses more clearly this spirit than Laplace's bold idea of a world formula which he expressed in a famous passage of his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités: ``A mind that in a given instance knew all the forces by which nature is animated and the position of all the bodies of which it is composed, if it were vast enough to include all these data within his analysis, could embrace in one single formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and of the smallest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for him; the future and the past would be equally before his eyes.''11.29 This idea, which exercised so profound a fascination11.30 on generations of scientistically minded people, is, as is now becoming apparent, not only a conception which describes an unattainable ideal, but in fact a quite illegitimate deduction from the principles by which we establish laws for particular physical events. It is now itself regarded by modern positivists as a ``metaphysical fiction.''11.31

It has been well described how the whole of the teaching at the Ecole polytechnique was penetrated with the positivist spirit of Lagrange and all the courses and the textbooks used were modeled on his example.11.32Perhaps even more important, however, for the general outlook of the polytechnicians was the definite practical bent inherent in all its teaching, the fact that all the sciences were taught mainly in their practical applications and that all the pupils looked forward to using their knowledge as military or civil engineers. The very type of the engineer with his characteristic outlook, ambitions, and limitations was here created. That synthetic spirit which would not recognize sense in anything that had not been deliberately constructed, that love of organization that springs from the twin sources of military and engineering practices,11.33 the aesthetic predilection for everything that had been consciously constructed over anything that had ``just grown,'' was a strong new element which was added to--and in the course of time even began to replace--the revolutionary ardor of the young polytechnicians. The peculiar characteristics of this new type who, as it has been said, ``prided themselves on having more precise and more satisfactory solutions than anyone else for all political, religious, and social questions,''11.34 and who ``ventured to create a religion as one learns at the Ecole to build a bridge or a road''11.35 were early noticed, and their propensity to become socialists has often been pointed out.11.36Here we must confine ourselves to point out that it was in this atmosphere that Saint-Simon conceived some of the earliest and most fantastic plans for the reorganization of society, and that it was at the Ecole polytechnique where, during the first twenty years of its existence, Auguste Comte, Prosper Enfantin, Victor Considérant, and some hundreds of later Saint-Simonians and Fourierists received their training, followed by a succession of social reformers throughout the century down to Georges Sorel.11.37

But, whatever the tendencies among the pupils of the institution, it must again be pointed out that the great scientists who built the fame of the Ecole polytechnique were not guilty of illegitimate extensions of their technique and habits of thought to fields which were not their own. They little concerned themselves with problems of man and society.11.38 This was the province of another group of men, in their time no less influential and admired, but whose efforts to continue the eighteenth-century traditions in the social sciences were in the end to be swamped by the tide of scientism and silenced by political persecution. It was the misfortune of the ideologues, as they called themselves, that their very name should be perverted into a catchword describing the very opposite from what they stood for, and that their ideas should fall into the hands of the young engineers who distorted and changed them beyond recognition.


next up previous contents
Next: V Up: The Source of the Previous: III   Contents