Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
As his disciples later gathered around his deathbed, he again sounded this
theme by reminding them of the evolutionary basis upon which positivism
stood. “The attack on the religious system of the Middle Ages has really
proved only this, that it was no longer in harmony with the positive sciences.
It would be wrong to conclude from this that religion tends to disappear;
only that it should adjust itself to scientific progress.”
44
Religion lived on in
science because science, as the voice of nature, represented its true essence.
It would be tempting to regard such utterances as mere anomalies, per-
haps as the aberrations of an author known to have been subject to periodic
bouts of mental illness and megalomania. But the fact that this feature of
positivism would become just as central in the more mature and more influ-
ential writings of Comte—who suffered from no similar psychiatric disor-
ders—belies any easy dismissal.
45
Like the Saint-Simonians who interpreted
their teacher's words as an explicit command to spread this pantheistic gos-
pel across Europe, Comte likewise saw himself as the prophet of a new “reli-
gion of humanity” that was the predestined end of positivism's evolution.
46
His habit of searching out analogies between the offices and doctrines of
this new scientific priesthood and its Catholic antecedent would become
one of the hallmarks of both his second magnum opus,
Systéme de politique
positive
(
System of Positive Polity
) (1875), and its accompanying handbook for
the masses, the
Catéchisme positiviste
(
Positivist Catechism
)
(1852).
As Comte made free to propose positivist sacraments and prayers, a
clergy over which he would reign as pope, a liturgical calendar, a positiv-
ist hagiography, and even hymns to the
Grande Être
, it is not surprising
that some of his disciples grew uneasy. They sometimes sensed that he was
merely dressing up traditional religious ideas in scientific clothing, but there
was always an escape clause in positivism's evolutionary premise. So long as
it could be presumed that this enduring religious language referenced the
natural underpinnings of the old faith and not its supernatural aspects, one
could always suppose that it therefore was science. In other words, Comte
makes free use of a persistent ambiguity that always abides within evolu-
tionary thinking. Whatever is understood to be a product of evolutionary
descent is necessarily both associated with and dissociated from what came
before. Technically speaking, for instance, explorations of human descent
(in the biological sense) are primarily concerned with the dissociative side
of evolution. To understand the developmental mechanisms that have made
us different from our ape ancestors is to attend primarily to the discontinui-
ties of evolution. But while it would thus be fair to interpret the theory of
human evolution as saying, no less than any doctrine of creation, that we
