required this task, at this time, are especially favourable to it. Its practical efficacy is inseparable from its theoretical soundness, because it connects the present, under all possible aspects, with the whole of the past, so as to exhibit at once the former course and the future tendency of every important phenomenon; and thence results, in a political view, the possibility of a natural connection between the science and the art of modern society. New as is this science, it has already fulfilled the essential conditions of its institution, so that it has only to pursue its special development. Its complexity is more than compensated by its interconnection, and the consequent preponderance of the collective spirit over the spirit of detail and from its origin, therefore, it is superior in rationality to all the foregoing sciences, and is evidently destined to extend its own collective spirit over them by its reactive influence, thus gradually repairing the mischiefs of the dispersive tendencies proper to the preparatory stages of genuine knowledge. Thus the scientific and the logical estimate are complete, and found to have attained the same point; and the long and difficult preparation proposed and begun by Descartes and Bacon is accomplished, and all made ready for the advent of the true modern philosophy. It only remains for me to show the action of this philosophy, intellectual and social, as far as it is at present rationally ascertainable by means of a last and extreme application of our theory of human evolution. CHAPTER XV. ESTIMATE OF THE FINAL ACTION OF THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. No preceding revolutions could modify human existence to anything like the degree that will be experienced under the full establishment of the positive philosophy, which we have seen to be the only possible issue from the great crisis which has agitated Europe for half a century past. We have already perceived what must be the political task and character of this philosophy in a rapidly approaching time; and I have only therefore to point out, in a more general way, the natural action of the new philosophical system when it shall have assumed its throne. I will sketch the great impending philosophical regeneration from the four points of view which my readers will at once anticipate;-the scientific, or rather rational; the moral; the political; and finally, the æsthetic. action. The positive state will, in the first place, be one of entire intellectual consistency, such as has never yet existed in The scientific an equal degree, among the best organized and most advanced minds. The kind of speculative unity which existed under the polytheistic system, when all human conceptions presented a uniformly religious aspect, was liable to perpetual disturbance from a spontaneous positivity of ideas on individual and familiar matters. In the scholastic period, the nearest approach to harmony was a precarious and incomplete equilibrium and the present transition involves such contradiction that the highest minds are perpetually subject to three incompatible systems. It is impossible to conceive of the contrasting harmony which must arise from all conceptions being fully positive, without the slightest necessary intermixture of any heterogeneous philosophy. We may best form some idea of it by anticipating the total and final extension of the popular good sense, which, long confined to partial and practical operations, has at length taken possession of the speculative province. We are naturally familiar with the general wisdom which prevails with regard to the simplest affairs of life; and, when we shall habitually restrict our inquiries to accessible subjects, and understand, as of course, the relative character of all human know ledge, our approximation towards the truth, which can never be completely attained by human faculties, will be thorough and satisfactory as far as it goes; and it will proceed as far as the state of human progress will admit. This logical view will completely agree with the scientific conviction of an invariable natural order, independent of us and our action, in which our intervention can occasion none but secondary modifications; these modifications however being infinitely valuable, because they are the basis of human action. We have never experienced, and can therefore only imperfectly imagine, the state of unmingled conviction with which men will regard that natural order when all disturbing intrusions, such as we are now subject to from lingering theological influences, shall have been cast out by the spontaneous certainty of the invariableness of natural laws. Again, the absolute tendencies of the old philosophies prevent our forming any adequate conception of the privilege of intellectual liberty which is secured by positive philosophy. Our existing state is so unlike all this, that we cannot yet estimate the importance and rapidity of the progress which will be thus secured; our only measure being the ground gained during the last three centuries, under an imperfect and even vicious system, which has occasioned the waste of the greater part of our intellectual labour. The best way of showing what advance may be made in sciences which are, as yet, scarcely out of the cradle, when systematically cultivated in an atmosphere of intellectual harmony, will be to consider the effect of positivity on abstract speculation first, then on concrete studies, and lastly on practical ideas. Abstract spe In abstract science men will be spared the preliminary labour which has hitherto involved vast and various error, culation. scientific and logical, and will be set forward far and firmly by the full establishment of the rational method. When the ascendency of the sociological spirit shall have driven out that of the scientific, there will be an end of the vain struggle to connect every order of phenomena with one set of laws, and the desired unity will be seen to consist in the agreement of various orders of laws, each set governing and actuating its own province; and thus will the free expansion of each kind of knowledge be provided for, while all are analogous in their method of treatment, and identical in their destination. Then there will be an end to the efforts of the anterior sciences to absorb the more recent, and of the more recent to maintain their superiority by boasting of sanction from the old philosophies; and the positive spirit will decide the claims of each, without oppression or anarchy, and with the necessary assent of all. The same unquestionable order will be established in the interior of each science; and every proved conception will be secured from such attacks as all are now liable to from the irregular ambition or empiricism of unqualified minds. Though INTELLECTUAL ACTION. Concrete research. 459 abstract science must hold the first place, as Bacon so plainly foresaw, the direct construction of concrete science is one of the chief offices of the new philosophical spirit, exercised under historical guidance, which can alone afford the necessary knowledge of the successive states of everything that exists. Besides the light which will thus be cast on the elementary laws of all kinds of action, and the valuable practical suggestions which must be thus obtained, there will be another result which I ought to point out, which could not be otherwise obtained, and which relates especially to the highest and most complex phenomena. I mean the fixing,-not yet possible, but then certainly practicable, of the general duration assigned by the whole economy to each of the chief kinds of existence; and, among others, to the rising condition of the human race. This great evolution, which has scarcely yet escaped from its preparatory stage, must certainly continue to be progressive through a long course of centuries, beyond which it would be equally inopportune and irrational to speculate; yet it is of consequence to the development of the philosophical spirit to admit in principle that the collective organism is necessarily subject, like the individual, to a spontaneous decline, independently of changes in the medium. The one has no more tendency to rejuvenescence than the other; and the only difference in the two cases is in the immensity of duration and slow progression in the one, compared with the brief existence, so rapidly run through, of the other. There is no reason why, because we decline the metaphysical notion of indefinite perfectibility, we should be discouraged in our efforts to ameliorate the social state; as the health of individuals is ministered to when destruction is certainly near at hand. Nor need we attempt to determine the last aspects that the philosophical spirit will assume, in an extremely remote future, always ready as that spirit is to recognize, without any fruitless disturbance, any destiny which is clearly inevitable, in order to solace the natural pain of decline by nobly sustaining the dignity of humanity. It is too soon in infancy to prepare for old age; and there would be less wisdom in such preparation in the collective than in the individual case. As to the case of practical knowledge, the most obvious prospect is of the permanent agreement that will be established between the practical point of view and the speculative, when both are alike subordinated to the philosophical. The practical development must go on rapidly under the ascendency of rational positivity; and, on the other hand, technical advancement will be equally efficacious in proving the immense superiority of the true scientific system to the desultory state of speculation that existed before. The sense of action and that of prevision are closely connected, through their common dependence on the principle of natural law; and this connection must tend to popularize and consolidate the new philosophy, in which each one will perceive the realization of the same general course with regard to all subjects accessible to our reason. The medical art, and the political, will be instances, when they shall rise out of their present infantile state, and be rationalized under the influence of a true philosophical unity, and concrete studies shall, at the same time, have been properly instituted. As the most complex phenomena are the most susceptible of modification, the true relation between speculation and action will be most conspicuous in the provinces which are most nearly concerned with the human condition and progress. Such will be the results in the intellectual portion of future human life. action. As to the moral,-its antagonism with the intellectual will be The moral proved to be what we have shown it-merely provisional; and dissolved at once when the sociological point of view is established as the only true one. I need not dwell on so clear a point as the moral tendency of the scientific elevation of the social point of view, and of the logical supremacy of collective conceptions, such as characterize the positive philosophy. In our present state of anarchy, we see nothing that can give us an idea of the energy and tenacity that moral rules must acquire when they rest on a clear understanding of the influence that the actions. and the tendencies of every one of us must exercise on human life. There will be an end then of the subterfuges by which even sincere believers have been able to elude moral prescriptions, since religious doctrines have lost their social efficacy. The sentiment of fundamental order will then retain its steadiness in the midst of the fiercest disturbance. The intellectual unity of that time will not only determine practical moral convictions in individual minds, but will also generate powerful public prepossession, by disclosing a plenitude of assent, such as has never existed in the same degree, and will supply the insufficiency of private efforts, in cases of very imperfect culture, or entanglement of passion. The instrumentality will not be merely the influence of moral doctrine, which would seldom avail to restrain vicious inclinations: there would be first the action of a universal education, and then the steady intervention of a wise discipline, public and private, carried on by the same moral power which had superintended the earlier training. The results cannot be even imagined without the guidance of the doctrines themselves, under their natural division into personal, domestic, and social morality. Morality must become more practical than it ever could be Personal under religious influences, because personal morality morality. will be seen in its true relations,-withdrawn from all influences of personal prudence, and recognized as the basis of all morality whatever, and therefore as a matter of general concern and public rule. The ancients had some sense of this, which they could not carry out; and Catholicism lost it by introducing a |