wrote, indeed, in his "Positive Polities," several admirable passages which show that the extension of Sociability and Mutual Aid among animals, and their ethical importance, had not escaped his attention.[1]
But to draw out of these facts the necessary, positivist conclusions, biological knowledge was wanting at the time he wrote, and Comte himself was wanting already in the necessary boldness. So he took God, the divinity of all the positive religions, which man is requested to worship and to pray to in order to remain moral, and in his stead he put Humanity with a capital letter. He invited us to prostrate ourselves before this new divinity, and to address our prayers to it in order to develop our moral feelings.
Once this was done, once it was recognised as necessary that man should adore some being placed outside and above him, so as to keep the human animal in the paths of duty—the rest followed of itself. The ritual of Comte's religion was easily found in the rituals of ancient religions which came from the East.
In fact, Comte was bound to come to such a conclusion, once he had not recognised that the moral sense of man, like sociability and society itself, had a pre-human origin; once he did not see in it a further development of animal sociability, fortified in man by the observation of Nature and by accumulated experience of the life of human societies.
Comte had not recognised that the moral sense of man is as much dependent upon his real nature as all the physical features of his organisation are; that both are an inheritance derived from an extremely long process of evolution—a process which had lasted already many scores of thousands of years.
He had noticed the feelings of sociability and mutual sympathy among the animals; but, under the influence of the great zoologist Cuvier, who was then the greatest authority, he had not admitted what Buffon and Lamarck had foreseen—the variability of species. He did not recognise the uninterrupted process of evolution from animal to man. Consequently, he could not see that the moral sense of man is nothing else but a
- ↑ I had not noticed these passages at the time I published the earlier editions of this essay. It was a Positivist friend in Brazil who drew my attention to them, sending me at the same time the second great work of Comte; and I take this opportunity to express to him my warmest thanks. There are pages and pages, full of genius, in this work of Comte as well; and to re-read them now, with all the knowledge accumulated during one's life—at the invitation of a friend—was a profound pleasure.
