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but he had done this as the inventor of monotheism. Socrates had made a
great scientific discovery when he first “conceived the idea of confiding the
power of Olympus in a single being.” He had “proclaimed that there was
one God, and that this God ruled everything, both as a whole and in its
separate parts.”
34
Until the age of Socrates none of the four peoples descended from the
plateau of Tartary achieved any great superiority over the others. Each
of them made similar progress. Each used its own powers to rise to the
conception of divinity, but none conceived this idea very clearly. Socrates
was the first to proclaim that the idea of
God
should be regarded as an
instrument of scientific calculation. He was the founder of general sci-
ence. Before Socrates ideas were only bundled together. He was the first
to begin to link them systematically.
35
Because of this, Socrates' advent was the apocalyptic event responsible
for the epochal divide separating
histoire ancienne
from
histoire moderne
.
36
The discovery of monotheism had brought into operation the dialectical
machinery of history that would thereafter accelerate the course of progress
toward its culmination in positivism.
When Saint-Simon goes on to say that it had been Socrates who
“invented God,” and that he is therefore the true author of Christianity
(its more familiar founder escapes mention altogether), he is by no means
saying that the God of monotheism exists.
37
No less than would be true of
the latter-day positivists of the Vienna Circle, the stated principle of Saint-
Simon's philosophy is a radical nominalism that nullified theological specu-
lation of any traditional sort. His God is a phenomenological deity, and the
traditional terms he uses to denote it are merely placeholders. Saint-Simon
continues to speak of “God” in this metonymic fashion, we might say, simply
because such traditional language sustains the sense of historical universal-
ism. The supreme being of monotheism may have been a merely unreal or at
best unknowable expression of the synthetic reasoning that was at work in
intellectual and social evolution, but to call reason by this traditional name
ensured the preordained continuity and purposeful character of the his-
torical progression that was leading toward positivism. The positivist apoca-
lypse that was destined to bring all the world into its compass at the end of
history would need to make sense of the past as well. Even the older pagan-
ism was now a stage in this scientific progression. The knowledge that the
older pagan rationality had merely “bundled together,” provided a necessary
step toward the “unitary” science of Socrates.
38
Positivism now recapitulated
