INCOMPETENCE OF POLITICAL LEADERS.

33

blem may be looked for from those who can do nothing but hinder it. From what we have already seen, we must be aware that the gradual demolition of all social maxims, and, at the same time, the attenuation of political action, must tend to remove elevated minds and superior understandings from such a career, and to deliver over the political world to the rule of charlatanism and mediocrity. The absence of any distinct and large conception of a social future is favourable to the more vulgar forms of ambition; and presumptuous and enterprising mediocrity has never before had so fortunate a chance. While social principles are not even sought, charlatanism will always attract by the magnificence of its promises; and its transient successes will dazzle society, while in a suffering condition, and deprived of all rational hope. Every impulse of noble ambition must turn the best men away from a field of action where there is no chance of scope and permanence, such as are requisite to the carrying out of generous schemes. It is, as M. Guizot has well said, a social period when men will feebly, but desire immensely. It is a state of half-conviction and half-will, resulting from intellectual and moral anarchy, offering many obstacles to the solution of our difficulties. It is important, however, not to exaggerate those obstacles. This very state of half-conviction and half-will tends to facilitate by anticipation the prevalence of a true conception of society which, once produced, will have no active resistance to withstand, because it will repose on serious convictions: and at present, the dispersion of social interests tends to preserve the material order which is an indispensable condition of philosophical growth. It would be a mere satirical exaggeration to describe existing society as preferring political quackery and illusion to that wise settlement which it has not had opportunity to obtain. When the choice is offered, it will be seen whether the attraction of deceptive promises, and the power of former habit, will prevent our age from entering, with ardour and steadiness, upon a better course. are evident symptoms that the choice will be a wise one, though the circumstances of the time operate to place the direction of the movement in hands which are anything but fittest for the purpose. This inconvenience dates from the beginning of the revolutionary period, and is not a new, but an aggravated evil. For three centuries past, the most eminent minds have been chiefly engaged with science, and have neglected politics; thus differing widely from the wisest men in ancient times, and even in the Middle Ages. The consequence of this is that the most difficult and urgent questions have been committed to the class which is essentially one under two names, the civilians and the metaphysicians, or, under their common title, the lawyers and men of letters, whose position in regard to statesmanship is naturally a subordinate one. We shall see hereafter that, from its origin to the time of the first French. Revolution, the system of metaphysical polity was expressed and

VOL. II.

There

C

directed by the universities on the one hand and the great judiciary corporations on the other: the first constituting a sort of spiritual, and the other the temporal power. This state of things is still traceable in most countries of the Continent; while in France, for above half a century, the arrangement has degenerated into such an abuse that the judges are superseded by the bar, and the doctors (as they used to be called) by mere men of letters; so that now, any man who can hold a pen may aspire to the spiritual regulation of society, through the press or from the professional chair, unconditionally, and whatever may be his qualifications. When the time comes for the constitution of an organic condition, the reign. of sophists and declaimers will have come to an end; but there will be the impediment to surmount of their having been provisionally in possession of public confidence.

The survey that we have made must convince us only too well of the anarchical state of existing society, under its destitution of guiding and governing ideas, and amidst its conflict of opinions and passions, which there is no power in any of the three schools to cure or moderate. As preliminary considerations, these facts are deeply disheartening; and we cannot wonder that some generous and able, but ill-prepared minds should have sunk into a kind of philosophical despair about the future of society, which appears to them doomed to fall under a gloomy despotism or into mere anarchy, or to oscillate between the two. I trust that the study we are about to enter upon will give rise to a consoling conviction that the movement of regeneration is going on, though quietly in comparison with the apparent decomposition, and that the most advanced of the human race are at the threshold of a social order worthy of their nature and their needs. I shall conclude this introduction by showing what must necessarily be the intellectual character of the salutary philosophy which is to lead us into this better future and its dogmatic exposition will follow in the next chapters.

Advent of the Positive

The preliminary survey which I have just concluded led us necessarily into the domain of politics. We must now return from this excursion, and take our stand Philosophy. again at the point of view of this whole Work, and contemplate the condition and prospects of society from the ground of positive philosophy. Every other ground has been found untenable. The theological and metaphysical philosophies have failed to secure permanent social welfare, while the positive philosophy has uniformly succeeded, and conspicuously for three centuries past, in reorganizing, to the unanimous satisfaction of the intellectual world, all the anterior orders of human conceptions, which had been till then in the same chaotic state that we now deplore, in regard to social science. Contemporary opinion regarded the state of each of those sciences as hopeless till the positive philosophy brought them out of it. There is no reason why it should fail in the latest

RATIONAL EXPECTATION FROM THE DOCTRINE. 35

application, after having succeeded in all the earlier. Advancing from the less complex categories of ideas to the more complex and final one, and comparing with this experience the picture just given of our present social condition, we cannot but see that the political analysis and the scientific concur in demonstrating that the positive philosophy, carried on to its completion, is the only possible agent in the reorganization of modern society. I wish to establish this principle first, and in this place, apart from all considerations about my way of proving my point; so that, if my attempt should be hereafter condemned, no unfavourable inference may be drawn in regard to a method which alone can save society, and that public reason should have nothing to do but to require from happier successors more effectual endeavours in the same direction. In all cases, and especially in this, the method is of even more importance than the doctrine; and it is for this reason that I think it right, before closing my long introduction, to offer, in a brief form, some last prefatory considerations.

This is not the place in which to enter upon any comparison between the positive political philosophy and the other social theories which have been tried; but, while still deferring the scientific appreciation of the positive method, and before quitting the political ground on which I have, for the occasion, taken my stand, I must point out in a direct and general way, the relation of the positive philosophy to the two great necessities of our age.

The ascendency of a positive social doctrine is secured by its perfect logical coherence in its entire application Logical co

herence of the doctrine.

a characteristic property which enables us at once to connect the political with the scientific point of view. The positive polity will embrace at once all the essential aspects of the present state of civilization, and will dissolve the deplorable opposition that now exists between the two orders of social needs, the common satisfaction of which will henceforth depend on the same principle. It will impart a homogeneous and rational character to the desultory politics of our day, and it will by the same act connect this co-ordinated present with the whole past, so as to establish a general harmony in the entire system of social ideas, by exhibiting the fundamental uniformity of the collective life of humanity; for this conception cannot, by its nature, be applied to the actual social state till it has undergone the test of explaining, from the same point of view, the continuous series of the chief former transformations of society. It is important to note this difference between the positive principle and that of the two other schools. The critical school treats all times prior to the revolutionary period with a blind reprobation. The retrograde school equally fails in uniting the present with the past, and uniformly disparages the position of modern society during the last three centuries. It is the exclusive property of the positive principle to

recognize the fundamental law of continuous human development, representing the existing evolution as the necessary result of the gradual series of former transformations, by simply extending to social phenomena the spirit which governs the treatment of all other natural phenomena. This coherence and homogeneousness of the positive principle is further shown by its operation in not only comprehending all the various social ideas in one whole, but in connecting the system with the whole of natural philosophy, and constituting thus the aggregate of human knowledge as a complete scientific hierarchy. We shall see hereafter how this is accomplished, and I mention it now to show how the positive philosophy, finding thus a general fulcrum in all minds, cannot but spread to a universal extension. In the present chaotic state of our political ideas we can scarcely imagine what must be the irresistible energy of a philosophical movement, in which the entire renovation of social science will be directed by the same spirit which is unanimously recognized as effectual in all other departments of human knowledge. Meantime, it finds some points of contact in the most wilful minds, from whence it may proceed to work a regeneration of views. It speaks to every class of society, and to every political party, the language best adapted to produce conviction, while maintaining the invincible originality of its fundamental character. It alone, embracing in its survey the whole of the social question, can render exact justice to the conflicting schools, by estimating their past and present services. It alone can exhibit to each party its highest destination, prescribing order in the name of progress, and progress in the name of order, so that each, instead of annulling, may strengthen the other. Bringing no stains from the past, this new polity is subject to no imputation of retrograde tyranny, or of revolutionary anarchy. The only charge that can be brought against it is that of novelty; and the answer is furnished by the evident insufficiency of all existing theories, and by the fact that for two centuries past its success has been uniform and complete, wherever it has been applied.

As to its operation upon Order, it is plain that true science has no other aim than the establishment of intellectual

Its effect

on Order. order, which is the basis of every other. Disorder dreads the scientific spirit even more than the theological, and, in the field of politics, minds which rebelled against metaphysical hypotheses and theological fictions submit without difficulty to the discipline of the positive method. We even see that while the mind of our day is accused of tending towards absolute scepticism, it eagerly welcomes the least appearance of positive demonstration, however premature and imperfect. The eagerness would be full as great if the idea were once formed that social science might also be conducted by the positive spirit. The conception of invariable natural laws, the foundation of every idea of order, in all depart

ITS EFFECT ON ORDER.

37

ments, would have the same philosophical efficacy here as elsewhere, as soon as it was sufficiently generalized to be applied to social phenomena, thenceforth referred, like all other phenomena, to such laws. It is only by the positive polity that the revolutionary spirit can be restrained, because by it alone can the influence of the critical doctrine be justly estimated and circumscribed. No longer roused to resistance, as by the retrograde school, and seeing its work done better than by itself, it will merge in a doctrine which leaves it nothing to do or to desire. Under the rule of the positive spirit, again, all the difficult and delicate questions which now keep up a perpetual irritation in the bosom of society, and which can never be settled while mere political solutions are proposed, will be scientifically estimated, to the great furtherance of social peace. By admitting at once that the institutions of modern societies must necessarily be merely provisional, the positive spirit will abate unreasonable expectations from them, and concentrate effort upon a fundamental renovation of social ideas, and consequently of public morals. Instead of indifference being caused by this carrying forward of political aims, there will be a new source of interest in so modifying modern institutions as to make them contributory to the inevitable intellectual and moral evolution. At the same time, it will be teaching society that, in the present state of their ideas, no political change can be of supreme importance, while the perturbation attending change is supremely mischievous, in the way both of immediate hindrance, and of diverting attention from the true need and procedure. And again, order will profit by the recognition of the relative spirit of the positive philosophy, which discredits the absolute spirit of the theological and metaphysical schools. It cannot but dissipate the illusion by which those schools are for ever strive ing to set up, in all stages of civilization, their respective types of immutable government; as when, for instance, they propose to civilize Tahiti by a wholesale importation of Protestantism and a Parliamentary system. Again, the positive spirit tends to consolidate order, by the rational development of a wise resignation to incurable political evils. Negative as is the character of this virtue, it affords an aid under the pains of the human lot which cannot be dispensed with, and which has no place under the metaphysical polity, which regards political action as indefinite. Religious, and especially Christian resignation is, in plain truth, only a prudent temporizing, which enjoins the endurance of present suffering in view of an ultimate ineffable felicity. A true resignation-that is, a permanent disposition to endure, steadily, and without hope of compensation, all inevitable evils, can proceed only from a deep sense of the connection of all kinds of natural phenomena with invariable laws. If there are (as I doubt not there are) political evils which, like some personal sufferings, cannot be remedied by science, science at least proves to us that they are incurable, so as