Let us also know how to own that in respect to many of these phenomena, and not the least important of them, we are absolutely powerless. Their conditions escape our grasp. For instance, the duration of human life is far from being as favourable to social evolution as might be conceived.[284] On the contrary, after the extreme imperfection of our organism, the brevity of life is one of the causes of the slowness of social development. How many powerful minds have died before their full maturity had yielded all its fruit! What would not have been expected of their genius if they had been in full possession of their faculties during three or four centuries! The positive theory of progress therefore entails neither optimism nor quietism. The intervention of man being excluded, the social state, which evolves, according to laws, at each period is just as good and as bad as it can be, “according to the whole of the situation.”[285] More than one pessimist would be satisfied with this formula. It is legitimately drawn from the principle of the conditions of existence. But, truly, from the point of view of this principle, that is to say, from the point of view of positive and relative philosophy, there can be no question either of optimism or of pessimism. Metaphysics alone can offer an absolute judgment upon the whole of the social reality. The positive doctrine, here as elsewhere, only seeks the statical and dynamical laws of phenomena. It is true, that it finds that the social evolution is, as a matter of fact, accompanied by improvement. But this improvement is so slow, so laborious, interrupted by so many crises, disturbed by so many conflicts, that if humanity aspires to a better condition, it is mainly from her own efforts that she must expect a slightly more rapid progress. FOOTNOTES: [259] Cours, IV, 430. [260] Cours, IV, 299. See also chapter II in Book I. [261] Cours, IV, 290-7. [262] Cours, IV, 182-6. [263] Pol. pos., II, 332-3. [264] Cours, V, 366. [265] Cours, IV, 185-7. [266] This referred in the Author’s mind to the famous quarrel in French literature between the admirers of ancient poetry like Boileau, who declared it to be superior to modern poetry, and their opponents like Perrault and Fontenelle, who took the contrary view. [267] Cours, IV, 257-9. [268] Pol. pos., I, 60-3. [269] Cours, IV, 188. [270] Pol. Pos., IV, Appendice, p. 199. [271] Cours, IV, 304-6. [272] Discours sur l’esprit positif, p. 59-60. [273] Pol. Pos., I, 106-8. [274] Pol. Pos., I, 54-56. [275] Lettres à Valat, p. 140 (8 septembre, 1824). [276] Cours, IV, 314-20. [277] Pol. pos. II, 450. [278] Cours, IV, 273. [279] Cours, VI, 825. [280] Cours, IV, 30-1; V, 241-2. [281] Cours, IV, 266. [282] Pol. pos., IV, Appendice, p. 95. [283] Cours, IV, 326. [284] Cours, IV, 510-12. [285] Cours, IV, 310-11. CHAPTER V THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY