Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899: Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899Various
History
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, March 1899: Volume LIV, No. 5, March 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Madame Clémence Royer has further occupied herself with special
researches on subjects of the same nature. Their results have been
published in the highly esteemed review, the Bulletin of the Société
d'Anthropologie. The most important of these memoirs relate to the
Craniology of the Quaternary Period, the Celts, the Origin of the
Different Human Races (1873), and the Domestication of Monkeys (1887).
The last work was published at the time of the appearance of a book by
M. Victor Meunier,[42] a believer in the possibility of domesticating
the simian race. His proposition, received in France as a kind of a
joke, taxed the genius of the Parisian caricaturists, because the
author had suggested that newborn children be nursed by monkeys, whose
milk was most like that of the human mother. Of course it was an easy
subject to joke about. Madame Royer showed how little originality
there was in this book. We might, she said, undoubtedly succeed in
educating monkeys, and they would at the end of many generations be in
certain cases superior to the dog and the horse. Unfortunately, the
struggle for existence opposed the adoption of the Utopian idea. The
place for each human recruit at the social table is now too narrow for
any part of it to be left for "our lower brethren."
Anthropological sciences were not the only ones to which the
encyclopedic mind of our learned philosopher was attracted. A few
years ago she returned to her earlier studies, and collaborated on the
_Nouveau Dictionnaire d'Économie Politique_ of Léon Say (1891-'92).
The most profound article she wrote for this work was that on the word
positivism. According to it, the Positive Philosophy dates, not from
Auguste Comte, who is believed to have introduced it, but from Bacon;
for its essential features may be found in the _Novum Organum_ and the
_Scientia nuova_. Furthermore, Madame Royer found that Comte
"emasculated" the doctrine of the famous chancellor. The principal
dogma of the system is the impossibility of knowledge of first causes
by our reason. This is an error, says Madame Royer. Two distinct ideas
have been confounded in the term first causes: first, the permanent
cause of phenomena, their essential "substratum," the discovery of
which man may perhaps some day reach; and, second, the supposed
primary term of each phenomenal law. But if the world is eternal, this
last does not exist, since "the eternity of the substantial involves
the eternity of its effects." Yet, while she attacks Comte's errors in
the sphere of sociology, she renders full justice to his Course of
Positive Philosophy, which was often in advance of its time in respect
to the exact sciences. Among other of Madame Royer's publications we
may cite _Zoroastre, son Epoque et sa Doctrine_ (Zoroaster, his Epoch
and his Doctrine, two volumes, 1875); _Les Ages Préhistoriques_ (The
Prehistoric Ages, 1876); _La Terre et ses Anciens Habitants_ (The
Earth and its Ancient Inhabitants, 1891), a sort of summary of recent
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