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THE PHILOSOPHY OF AUGUSTE COMTE

BY L. LÉVY-BRUHL Maître de Conférences de Philosophie à la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Paris, Professeur à l’Ecole libre des Sciences politiques.

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION

TO WHICH IS PREFIXED AN INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC HARRISON, M.A. Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford.

NOTE

BY

MR. FREDERIC HARRISON

The publication in 1900 of Professor Lévy-Bruhl’s volume The Philosophy of Auguste Comte was an event in the history of the Positive movement. The eminent position in the University of Paris and in recent philosophical history that is held by Prof. Lévy-Bruhl gave great interest and importance to a systematic judgment from his pen such as the present work. The commemorative festival of Comte held this year, when the statue in the Place de la Sorbonne was unveiled by the Minister of War, in presence of an international gathering of delegates from the civilised world, has called fresh attention to the lifework of the philosopher who died 45 years ago. Accordingly, a translation of Professor Lévy-Bruhl’s book was urgently demanded. When I was invited to add to this translation, which I can confidently recommend to students of philosophy, a slight introductory essay, I proposed to use a piece which I wrote on the publication of the French work. It appeared in “The Speaker,” (14 April, 1900;) and, as I see no reason to modify my opinion of this masterly book, I leave it nearly as then written. I may add that the learned Professor was a member of the International Committee with many eminent representatives of the government of France and of the Universities of the Old and New World, which in May last raised the monument to Auguste Comte in Paris.

Professor Lévy-Bruhl followed up his History of Modern Philosophy in France by a substantial work on the philosophy of Auguste Comte. It forms a volume of the Bibliothèque de Philosophie Contemporaine, which has already devoted four other works to the Positive Philosophy. It is as well to premise that this treatise dealt solely with the philosophy, not with the polity, or any part of the religious scheme of Comte. Professor Lévy-Bruhl writes as a student, but not as an adherent of Auguste Comte. His entire work is rather an exposition, not a refutation, or a criticism, or an advocacy of Comte’s philosophical system. But it may be said at once that no one abroad or at home, certainly neither Mill, nor Lewes, nor Spencer, nor Caird, has so truly grasped and assimilated Comte’s ideas as M. Lévy-Bruhl has done.

In his Introduction M. Lévy-Bruhl very clearly states the scope of his work, and his own general attitude. He traces the origin of Comte’s philosophy in the mental effervescence of the first generation of the present century towards a reorganisation of society, after the upheaval left by the Revolution and its consequences. He correctly states the relation of St. Simon to Comte as being that of an initial stimulus. The cardinal difference between Comte and all the socialists and founders of social and religious Utopias consisted in this, that Comte saw the necessity of a new system of philosophy as the indispensable preliminary to any reorganisation of society. In 1824, at the age of twenty-six, Comte wrote:—“Discussions about institutions are pure folly until the spiritual reconstitution of society is effected or much advanced.” The construction of an intellectual reorganisation, before any social restoration was possible, occupied twenty or thirty years of Comte’s life. And when he opened his Polity, or social and religious scheme, the conditions had much changed: the public and its interests were no longer what they had been in 1820-30.

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