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II

The whole of Comte's philosophy hinges, of course, upon the celebrated law of the three stages which we have already met in his early essays. His very task is determined for him by that law: all the simpler sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology having reached the positive stage, it was reserved for Comte to do the same for the crowning science of the human race and thus to complete the main development of the human mind. The stress which Comte himself and still more his interpreters have put on the three separate stages is, however, rather misleading. The great contrast is between, on the one hand, the theological and the metaphysical stage (the latter being a mere ``modification''16.6 of the first), and, on the other, the positive stage. What he is concerned with is the continuous and gradual emancipation from the anthropomorphic interpretation of all phenomena16.7which each science completely achieves only as it reaches the positive stage. The metaphysical stage is no more than the phase of dissolution of the theological stage, the critical phase in which man has already abandoned the cruder personalistic view which seeks spirits and deities in all phenomena, but has merely replaced them with abstract entities or essences which have as little place in the truly positivist view of science. In the positive phase every attempt to explain phenomena by causes or a statement of the ``mode of production'' is abandoned;16.8it aims at directly connecting the observed phenomena by rules about the coexistence or sequence or, to use a modern phrase not yet used by Comte, at merely ``describing'' their interrelations by general and invariable laws. In other words, since the habits of thought which man had acquired in interpreting the actions of his own kind had long held up the study of external nature, and the latter had only made real progress in proportion as it got rid of this human habit, the way to progress in the study of man must be the same: we must cease to consider man anthropomorphically and must treat him as if we knew about him as little as we know about external nature. Although Comte does not say so in so many words, he comes very near doing so, and therefore one cannot help wondering how he could have failed to see the paradoxical nature of this conclusion.16.9

But that in the positive treatment of social phenomena man must not be treated differently from the way in which we approach the phenomena of inanimate nature is only a negative characteristic of the character which the new ``natural science''16.10 of society will assume. We have yet to see what the positive characteristics of the ``positive'' method are. This is a far more difficult task, as Comte's statements on most of the epistemological problems involved are distressingly naive and unsatisfactory. The basis of Comte's views is the apparently simple contention that ``the fundamental character of all positive philosophy is to regard all phenomena as subject to invariable natural laws, whose precise discovery and reduction to the smallest number possible is the aim of all our effort.''16.11 All science deals with observed facts,16.12 and, as he states in a sentence which he quotes with pride from his essay of 1825, ``any proposition which does not admit of being reduced to a simple enunciation of fact, special or general, can have no real or intelligible sense.''16.13 But the question to which it is exceedingly difficult to find an answer in Comte's work is what precisely is meant by the ``phenomena'' which are all subject to invariable laws, or what he regards as ``facts.'' The statement that all phenomena are subject to invariable natural laws clearly makes sense only if we are given some guidance on what individual events are to be regarded as the same phenomena. It evidently cannot mean that everything which appears the same to our senses must behave in the same manner. The task of science is precisely to reclassify the sense impressions on the basis of their coexistence with or succession to others so as to make it possible to establish regularities for the behavior of the newly constructed units of reference. But this is exactly what Comte objects to. The construction of such new entities as the ``ether'' is definitely a metaphysical procedure and any attempt to explain the ``mode of production'' of the phenomena as distinct from the study of the laws which connect the directly observed facts is to be proscribed. The emphasis lies on the establishment of direct relationship among the immediately given facts. But what these facts (which may be ``particular'' or ``general''!) are seems to constitute no problem for Comte, who approaches the question with an entirely naive and uncritical realism. As in the whole of nineteenth-century positivism,16.14 this concept is left exceedingly obscure.


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