Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
ordained to lead the world into its final age because his work had been
inspired by “the rare moral renovation wrought at the right moment by
a purified passion.” “Emancipated from theology before the end of child-
hood, and trained betimes in positive studies,” and having also passed
“rapidly though the metaphysical period,” Comte was history's pioneer. The
“true cerebral unity” that he had realized personally at the age of twenty-
four was a prophetic anticipation of the whole process of social evolution.
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This made it “essential that both stages of this exceptional career should
be elaborated by the same organ of humanity; otherwise their adaptation
would have been imperfect.”
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P
ositivism
anD
the
s
ymBolic
s
tRuctuRes
of
s
cientific
P
atRonage
Superficially, these last messianic professions might seem to be mere anoma-
lies when we look back upon them from this historical distance. They might
seem, at best, expressions of egoistic self-indulgence—perhaps even megalo-
mania. The casual reader is now likely to laugh at Saint-Simon's claim that
he was Charlemagne reincarnated and will perhaps pull back in revulsion,
as even some of Comte's disciples did, at their teacher's wish to be recog-
nized as pope over a new religion that worshiped humanity as its
Grand
Être
.
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But if we consider the practical rhetorical purposes that such eccen-
tricities were capable of supporting, they will not seem nearly so mysterious.
These writers were conserving a version of the scientific ethos that by this
time had been in place for two centuries. The modern scientific ethos that
arose within a theological framework could not persist in a new secularized
one except by imitating this older worldview.
What we have not yet seen, except in general outline, is the relevance
of these theological imitations for those specifically trying to build scientific
patronage. The prospering of the natural sciences was not the direct concern
of the positivist movement, but it had analogous aspirations for the social
scientific field it was founding. The assumption of the positivists that reason
applied to nature was giving rise to meanings such as were formerly sus-
tained by sacred history made its philosophers spiritual authorities, the high
priests of an emerging secular culture. Recognizably, this descends from the
Baconian view of science, but it does not represent the genealogical branch
that gave rise to evolutionism. Positivism had carried on the older tradition
of regarding science in millenarian terms, but because it envisioned this,
not as a historical culmination in which the broadening scope of physics,
chemistry, and biology would encompass politics and commerce, but as one
