Comte, Auguste The Positive Philosophy Vol II

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like other animals, cannot be happy without a sufficient exercise of all
his faculties, intense and persistent in proportion to the intrinsic activity
of each faculty. The greater difficulty experienced by man in obtaining
a development compatible with the special superiority of his nature ren-
ders him more subject than the other animals to that remarkable state of
irksome languor which indicates at once the existence of the faculties
and their insufficient activity, and which would become equally irrecon-
cilable with a radical debility incapable of ally urgent tendency, and
with an ideal vigour, spontaneously susceptible of indefatigable exer-
cise. A disposition at once intellectual and moral, which we daily see at
work in natures endowed with any energy, must have powerfully accel-
erated the human expansion, in the infancy of humanity, by the uneasy
excitement it occasioned either in the eager search for new sources of
emotion, or in the more intense development of direct human activity.
This secondary influence is not very marked till the social state is suffi-
ciently advanced to make men feel a growing need to exercise the high-
est faculties, which are, as we have seen, the least energetic. The stron-
gest faculties, which are the lowest, are so easily exercised that in ordi-
nary circumstances they can hardly generate the ennui which would
produce a favourable cerebral reaction. Savages, like children, are not
subject to much ennui while their physical activity, which alone is of
any importance to them, is not interfered with. An easy and protracted
sleep prevents them, as if they were mere animals, from feeling their
intellectual torpor in any irksome way. This brief notice of the influence
of ennui was necessary, to show what its operation really amounts to in
accelerating the speed of our social evolution. But perhaps the most
important of all accelerating influences is the ordinary duration of hu-
man life, which I mention in the second place. There is no denying that
our social progression rests upon death. I mean, the successive steps
suppose the steady renewal of the agents of the general movement, which
is almost imperceptible in the course of any single life, and becomes
marked only on the succession of a new generation. Here again the so-
Positive Philosophy/253
cial resembles the individual organism,—being under the same neces-
sity to throw off its constituent parts as they become, by the vital action
itself, unfit for further use, and must be replaced by new elements. To
illustrate this, we need not go so far as to suppose an indefinite duration
of human life, which would presently put a stop to all progression what-
ever. It is enough to imagine it lengthened tenfold only, its respective
periods preserving their present proportions. If the general constitution
of the brain remained the same as now, there must be a retardation,
though we know not how great, in our social development: for the per-
petual conflict which goes on between the conservative instinct that be-
longs to age and the innovating instinct which distinguishes youth would
be much more favourable than now to the former. From the extreme
imperfection of the higher parts of our nature, even those who, in their
prime, have contributed most to human progress cannot preserve their
due social eminence very long without becoming more or less hostile to
the further progress which they cannot assist. But an ephemeral life
would be quite as mischievous as a too protracted one by giving too
much power to the instinct of innovation The resistance which this in-
stinct now meets with from the conservatism of age compels it to ac-
commodate its efforts to the whole of what has been already done. With
out this check, our feeble nature, which has a strong repugnance to
irksome and continuous labour, would be for ever proposing incomplete
views and crude attempts, that could never ripen into mature projects
and feasible acts: and this would be the inevitable state of things, if
human life were reduced to a quarter, or even to half its present length.
Such would be the consequences, in either case, if we suppose the con-
stitution of the human brain to be much what it is now: and to suppose
it essentially changed, would be to carry us over into the region of hy-
pothesis.
No justification is however afforded by these considerations to the
optimism elf the advocates of final causes: for if, in this as in every
other case, the actual order is necessarily more or less accordant with
the course of the phenomena, it is very far from being true that the
arrangement of the natural economy is as good for its purposes as we
can easily conceive. The slowness of our social development is no doubt
partly owing to the extreme imperfection of our organism; but it is ow-
ing nearly as much to the brevity of human life: and there would be no
risk to any other great arrangement if the duration of our life, while still
limited by the conditions just specified, were doubled or trebled. We
254/Auguste Comte
have hardly thirty years (and those beset with impediments) to devote to
other purposes than preparation for life or for death; and this is a very
insufficient balance between what Man can devise and what he can ex-
ecute. Probably no one has ever noble devoted himself to the direct
advancement of the human mind without bitterly feeling how time, em-
ployed to the utmost, failed him for the working out of more than an
insignificant part of his conceptions. It will not do to say that the rapid
succession of coadjutors compensates for this restriction of individual
activity. Important as this compensation is, it is very imperfect, both on
account of the loss of time in preparing each successor, and because the
precise continuance of the work by different persons, occupying differ-
ent points of view, is impossible, and the more out of the question ex-
actly in proportion to the value of the new coadjutors. In the simplest
material operations, no man’s work has ever been carried on by others
precisely as he would have done it himself; and the more difficult and
lofty labours, which require intellectual and moral forces to complete
them, are much more in need of a persistent unity in their management.
These intellectual and moral forces no more admit of partition and addi-
tion by successors than by contemporaries, and, whatever the advocates
of the indefinite distribution of individual efforts may say, a certain
degree of concentration is necessary to the accomplishment of human
progress.
Another cause which affects the rate of progress is the natural in-
crease of population, which contributes more than any other influence
to accelerate the speed. This increase has always been regarded as the
clearest symptom of the gradual amelioration of the human condition;
and nothing can be more unquestionable when we take the whole race
into the account, or at least, all the nations which have any mutual inter- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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