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IV

There are no further important developments in Saint-Simon's writings till 1813. Once more plunged into abject poverty by the death of his faithful valet, he starved and in the end fell dangerously ill. He was rescued by an old acquaintance, a notaire, who negotiated a settlement with his family under which, in return for giving up all expectations of future inheritance, he received a small annual pension. Once again settled in tolerable comfort, his work entered a new phase. Finally disillusioned in his hope of obtaining the collaboration of the physicists, he turned away from the brutiers, infinitésimaux, algébristes et arithméticiens, 12.36 whom he no longer conceded the right to regard themselves as the scientific advance guard of humanity, and taking up the second strand of thought from his first work, he turned again to the biologists.

In his Mémoire sur la science de l'homme (part of which, however, still bears the separate title Travail sur la gravitation universelle), his problem is again how physiology, of which the science of man is a part, can be treated by the methods adopted by the physical sciences12.37 and thus follow those sciences in the progress from the ``conjectural'' to the ``positive'' stage.12.38 With the science of man, as part and summit of physiology, morals and politics must also become positive sciences,12.39and thus ``the passage from the idea of many particular laws regulating the phenomena of the divers branches of physics to the idea of a single and unique law regulating them all'' must become completed.12.40 When this is achieved and all the particular sciences have become positive, the general science, that is, philosophy, will also become positive.12.41 It will then at last be able to become the new spiritual power, which must remain separate from the temporal power, since this is a division incapable of improvement.12.42 With this organization of the ``positive system'' we shall have definitely entered into the third great epoch of human history of which the first, or preliminary, was ended with Socrates while the second or conjectural has lasted to the present.12.43

This development of ideas which we can observe enables us to predict their future movement.12.44 Since ``the cause which acts strongest on society is a change, a perfectioning of the ideas, the general beliefs,''12.45 we can do even more, we can develop a theory of history, a general history of mankind, which will deal not merely with the past and present but also with the future. Such an abridged history of the past, future, and present of the human mind Saint-Simon proposed in the program of the third memoir on the science of man. It is ``the happiest idea which has ever presented itself to his mind'' and he is ``enchanted by the conception,''12.46 but for the moment he develops it no further. As with most of his works before 1814, the idea remained a promise of future things to come, a prospectus of work he would like to do, but the Mémoire itself is still an unorganized mass full of irrelevant detail and bizarre conceits from which one can extract the fertile ideas only because one knows their later development.


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