Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
it sustained a historical linkage that enabled science to retain some of the
meaning it had formerly gained through its identification with religion.
Now regarded as mere developmental steps, traditional religious viewpoints
remained in check since they could no longer claim to exercise any influ-
ence in the coming enlightened age. But while traditional religion was thus
disarmed, science could also present itself as its rightful heir. As we will
also see when we turn to evolutionism proper in the next two chapters, this
was achieved by scientizing progress—by contending that a view that was in
fact the product of narrative displacement had resulted from the scientific
discovery of history's evolutionary structure.
It was such a vision of history that enabled Saint-Simon to speak of
positivism as a
Nouveau Christianisme
,. Like every other kind of prescientific
thought, religion had been scientific rationality in the process of becoming.
In its former life, it had been a merely immature attempt to achieve the
same goal that a grown-up humanity now pursued more self-consciously—
the “progress of the universal idea.”
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In science, he declared in his
Mémoire
sur la science de l'homme
, the key had been found that would decode every
other system of thought:
Systems of religion, politics, ethics, and education, are simply applications
of the system of ideas, or, in other words, of the system of thought, con-
sidered under different aspects. Thus it is obvious that when the new
scientific system has been constructed, a reorganization of the religious,
political, ethical, and educational system will take place; and conse-
quently a reorganization of the church.
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The reconstitution of the Catholic Church on positivist grounds was for
Saint-Simon the endpoint of evolutionary history. The church had been the
most universal of those systems of thought that had formerly encompassed
all other systems, and so it represented the clearest historical antecedent
and type for positivism—the science of sciences that was destined to take
charge of history and to draw every other realm of inquiry into itself. Positiv-
ism, in other words, was providing the historical framework for the entire
project of modernity.
The historical form that Saint-Simon gave to this scientific claim reflects
that same pattern of displacement that we have seen already in the messages
of his forebears. This evolutionary view of history related science to religion
on naturalistic grounds by reducing the latter to its merely sociological ele-
ments, but it also did so, no less than the similar schemes of Bacon and
