Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Dupuis' thesis was attractive to opponents of the Bourbon Restoration
because its reduction of religion to science armed secularist arguments
against the reestablishment of Catholic authority.
29
But it also suggested
that science was being elevated to take its place, that science could pro-
vide what conservative reactionaries sought by restoring some part of the
church's power, and this was the opportunity that Saint-Simon ran with. If
the philosophers of the Enlightenment had been influenced by the instinc-
tive fear, as Carl Becker puts it, “that to profess atheism would be no less a
confession of failure than to return like lost sheep to the Christian fold,”
this had become a manifest concern for their successors.
30
Saint-Simon
seems to have recognized in Dupuis' scheme how an explicitly evolution-
ary view might enable one, in some sense, to make the first of these options
mean the same thing as the second. If the past religions of a given culture
represented scientific thinking at some stage of its social evolution, then
one could embrace the past without abandoning one's commitment to the
purity of the new scientific way. The new age of science, he declared in his
1813
Mémoire sur la science de l'homme
, was thus a continuation of the age
of Catholicism since “every organization of the scientific system leads to
the reorganization and improvement of the religious system.”
31
Formally,
traditional religious beliefs may have remained what they were for the
phi-
losophes
, the empty productions of alienated reason, but informally their
older meanings tended to abide, especially because they were now linked
to scientific conceptions by an evolutionary premise. Because religious
ideas were also the steps by which nature was leading humanity toward
the positive science of society that was destined to fulfill all the same func-
tions, formal distinctions were in effect muddled. Dupuis' evolutionary
viewpoint had made a precise distinction impossible, and this enabled his
successors to perpetuate religious ideas even while insisting that they were
advancing a scientific perspective.
P
Roto
-
evolutionism
This pattern is the pivotal element of evolutionism put in place by the posi-
tivists. To reduce religion to science was to enlarge the scope of scientific
authority, but it also naturalized the deeper spiritual associations that sci-
ence had already achieved in the Baconian era. As an effort to reconstruct
the scientific ethos, we might say that positivism enjoyed the best of both
worlds. It maintained the Enlightenment view that science was, epistemi-
cally speaking, religion's superior, but by doing this on evolutionary grounds
