A General View of Positivism: Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and LifeComte, Auguste
Philosophy
A General View of Positivism: Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
Comte, Auguste
Positivism
But in such cases, unless the advice given by the philosophers has been
wrong, the suspension of work is not likely to be sufficiently general
to bring about any important result.
This theory of trade-unions is, in fact, in the industrial world,
what the power of insurrection is with regard to the higher social
functions; it is an ultimate resource which every collective organism
must reserve. The principle is the same in the simpler and more
ordinary cases as in the more unusual and important. In both the
intervention of the philosophic body, whether solicited or not, whether
its purpose be to organize popular effort or to repress it, will
largely influence the result.
We are now in a position to state with more precision the main
practical difference between the policy of Positivism, and that of
Communism or of Socialism. All progressive political schools agree in
concentrating their attention upon the problem, How to give the people
their proper place as a component element of modern Society, which
ever since the Middle Ages has been tending more and more distinctly
to its normal mode of existence. They also agree that the two great
requirements of the working classes are, the organization of Education,
and the organization of Labour. But here their agreement ends. When
the means of effecting these two objects have to be considered,
Positivists find themselves at issue with all other Progressive
schools. They maintain that the organization of Industry must be based
upon the organization of Education. It is commonly supposed that both
may be begun simultaneously: or indeed that Labour may be organized
irrespectively of Education. It may seem as if we are making too much
of a mere question of arrangement; yet the difference is one which
affects the whole character and method of social reconstruction. The
plan usually followed is simply a repetition of the old attempt to
reconstruct politically without waiting for spiritual reconstruction;
in other words, to raise the social edifice before its intellectual and
moral foundations have been laid. Hence the attempts made to satisfy
popular requirements by measures of a purely political kind, because
they appear to meet the evil directly; a course which is as useless
as it is destructive. Positivism, on the contrary, substitutes for
such agencies, an influence which is sure and peaceful, although it be
gradual and indirect; the influence of a more enlightened morality,
supported by a purer state of Public Opinion; such opinion being
organized by competent minds, and diffused freely amongst the people.
In fact, the whole question, whether the solution of the twofold
problem before us is to be empirical, revolutionary, and therefore
confined simply to France; or whether it is to be consistent, pacific,
and applicable to the whole of Western Europe, depends upon the
preference or the postponement of the organization of Labour to the
organization of Education.
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