This brings me back to the common central idea which underlies all these particular similarities of the doctrines of Comte and Hegel: the idea that we can improve upon the results of the earlier individualist approaches with their modest endeavor to understand how individual minds interact, by studying human Reason, with a capital R, from the outside as it were, as something objectively given and observable as a whole, as it might appear to some supermind. From the belief that they had achieved the old ambition of se ipsam cognoscere mentem, and that they had reached a position where they were able to predict the future course of the growth of Reason, it was only one step more to the still more presumptuous idea that Reason should now be able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps to its definitive or absolute state. It is in the last analysis this intellectual hubris, the seeds of which were sown by Descartes, and perhaps already by Plato, which is the common trait in Hegel and Comte. The concern with the movement of Reason as a whole not only prevented them from understanding the process through which the interaction of individuals produced structures of relationships which performed actions no individual reason could fully comprehend, but it also made them blind to the fact that the attempt of conscious reason to control its own development could only have the effect of limiting this very growth to what the individual directing mind could foresee. 17.58 Although this aspiration is a direct product of a certain brand of rationalism, it seems to me to be the result of a misunderstood rationalism, better called intellectualism--a rationalism which fails in its most important task, namely, in recognizing the limits of what individual conscious reason can accomplish.
Hegel and Comte both singularly fail to make intelligible how the interaction of the efforts of individuals can create something greater than they know. While Adam Smith and the other great Scottish individualists of the eighteenth century--even though they spoke of the ``invisible hand''--provided such an explanation,17.59all that Hegel and Comte give us is a mysterious teleological force. And while eighteenth-century individualism, essentially humble in its aspirations, aimed at understanding as well as possible the principles by which the individual efforts combined to produce a civilization in order to learn what were the conditions most favorable to its further growth, Hegel and Comte became the main source of that hubris of collectivism which aims at ``conscious direction'' of all forces of society.