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I

Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road which has led him to great success. And never can pride in the achievements of the natural sciences and confidence in the omnipotence of their methods have been more justified than at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and nowhere more so than at Paris, where almost all the great scientists of the age congregated. If it is true, therefore, that the new attitude of man toward social affairs in the nineteenth century was due to the new mental habits acquired in the intellectual and material conquest of nature, we should expect it to appear where modern science celebrated its greatest triumphs. In this we shall not be disappointed. Both the two great intellectual forces which in the course of the nineteenth century transformed social thought--modern socialism and that species of modern positivism, which we prefer to call scientism-- spring directly from this body of professional scientists and engineers which grew up in Paris, and more particularly from the new institution which embodied the new spirit as no other, the Ecole polytechnique.

It is well known that the French Enlightenment was characterized by a general enthusiasm for the natural sciences as never was known before. Voltaire is the father of that cult of Newton which later was to be carried to ridiculous heights by Saint-Simon. And the new passion soon began to bear great fruits. At first the interest concentrated on the subjects connected with Newton's great name. In Clairault and d'Alembert, with Euler, the greatest mathematicians of the period, Newton soon found worthy successors who in turn were followed by Lagrange and Laplace, no less giants. And with Lavoisier, not only the founder of modern chemistry but also a great physiologist, and, to a lesser degree, with Buffon in biological science, France began to take the lead in all important fields of natural knowledge.

The great Encyclopaedie was a gigantic attempt to unify and popularize the achievements of the new science, and d'Alembert's ``Discours préliminaire'' (1754) to the great work, in which he attempted to trace the rise, progress and affinities of the various sciences, may be regarded as the Introduction not only to the work but to a whole period. This great mathematician and physicist did much to prepare the way for the revolution in mechanics by which toward the end of the century his pupil Lagrange finally freed it from all metaphysical concepts and restated the whole subject without any reference to ultimate causes or hidden forces, merely describing the laws by which the effects were connected.11.1 No other single step in any science expresses more clearly the tendency of the scientific movement of the age or had greater influence or symbolic significance.11.2

Yet while this step was still gradually preparing in the field where it was to take its most conspicuous form, the general tendency which it expressed was already recognized and described by d'Alembert's contemporary Turgot. In the amazing and masterly discourses which as a young man of twenty-three he delivered at the opening and the closing of the session of the Sorbonne in 1750, and in the sketch of a Discourse on Universal History of the same period, he outlined how the advance of our knowledge of nature was accompanied throughout by a gradual emancipation from those anthropomorphic concepts which first led man to interpret natural phenomena after his own image as animated by a mind like his own. This idea, which was later to become the leading theme of positivism and was ultimately misapplied to the science of man himself, was soon afterward widely popularized by President C. de Brosses under the name of fetishism,11.3 the name under which it remained known till it was much later replaced by the expressions anthropomorphism and animism. But Turgot went even further and, completely anticipating Comte on this point, described how this process of emancipation passed through three stages where, after supposing that natural phenomena were produced by intelligent beings, invisible but resembling ourselves, they began to be explained by abstract expressions such as essences and faculties, till at last ``by observing reciprocal mechanical action of bodies hypotheses were formed which could be developed by mathematics and verified by experience.''11.4

It has often been pointed out11.5 that most of the leading ideas of French positivism had already been formulated by d'Alembert and Turgot and their friends and pupils Lagrange and Condorcet. For most of what is valid and valuable in that doctrine this is unquestionably true, although their positivism differed from that of Hume by a strong tinge of French rationalism. And, as there will be no opportunity to go into this aspect more fully, it should perhaps be specially stressed at this stage that throughout the development of French positivism this rationalist element, probably due to the influence of Descartes, continued to play an important role.11.6

It must be pointed out, however, that these great French thinkers of the eighteenth century showed scarcely any trace yet of that illegitimate extension to the phenomena of society of scientistic methods of thought which later became so characteristic of that school--excepting perhaps certain ideas of Turgot about the philosophy of history and still more so some of Condorcet's last suggestions. But none of them had any doubt about the legitimacy of the abstract and theoretical method in the study of social phenomena, and they were all staunch individualists. It is particularly interesting to observe that Turgot, and the same is true of David Hume, was at the same time one of the founders of positivism and of abstract economic theory, against which positivism was later to be employed. But in some respects most of these men unwittingly started trains of thought which produced views on social matters very different from their own.

This is particularly true of Condorcet. A mathematician like d'Alembert and Lagrange, he definitely turned to the theory as well as to the practice of politics. And although to the last he understood that ``meditation alone may lead us to general truths in the science of man,''11.7 he was not merely anxious to supplement this by extensive observation but occasionally expressed himself as if the method of the natural sciences were the only legitimate one in the treatment of the problems of society. It was particularly his desire to apply his beloved mathematics, especially the newly developed calculus of probability, to his second sphere of interest, which led him to stress more and more the study of those social phenomena which would be objectively observed and measured.11.8 As early as 1783, in the oration at his reception into the academy, he gave expression to what was to become a favorite idea of positivist sociology, that of an observer to whom physical and social phenomena would appear in the same light, because, ``a stranger to our race, he would study human society as we study those of the beavers and bees.''11.9 And although he admits that this is an unattainable ideal because ``the observer is himself a part of human society,'' he repeatedly exhorts the scholars ``to introduce into the moral sciences the philosophy and the method of the natural sciences.''11.10

The most seminal of his suggestions, however, occurs in his Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, the famous testament of the eighteenth century, as it has been called, in which the unbounded optimism of the age found its last and greatest expression. Tracing human progress in a great outline through all history, he conceives of a science which might foresee the future progress of the human race, accelerate and direct it.11.11 But to establish laws which will enable us to predict the future, history must cease to be a history of individuals and must become a history of the masses, must at the same time cease to be a record of individual facts but must become based on systematic observation.11.12 Why should the attempt to base on the results of the history of the human race a picture of its future destiny be regarded as chimerical? ``The only foundation for the knowledge of the natural sciences is the idea that the general laws, known or unknown, which regulate the phenomena of the universe, are necessary and constant; and why should that principle be less true for the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for the other actions of nature?''11.13 The idea of natural laws of historical development and the collectivist view of history were born, not merely as bold suggestions, it is true, but to remain with us in a continuous tradition to the present day.11.14


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