CHAPTER XV - ESTIMATE OF THE FINAL ACTION OF THE POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY

Summary

No preceding revolutions could modify human existence to anything like the degree that will be experienced under the full establishment of the positive philosophy, which we have seen to be the only possible issue from the great crisis which has agitated Europe for half a century past. We have already perceived what must be the political task and character of this philosophy in a rapidly approaching time; and I have only therefore to point out, in a more general way, the natural action of the new philosophical system when it shall have assumed its throne. I will sketch the great impending philosophical regeneration from the four points of view which my readers will at once anticipate;—the scientific, or rather rational; the moral; the political; and finally, the aesthetic.

The scientific action.

The positive state will, in the first place, be one of entire intellectual consistency, such as has never yet existed in an equal degree, among the best organized and most advanced minds. The kind of speculative unity which existed under the polytheistic system, when all human conceptions presented a uniformly religious aspect, was liable to perpetual disturbance from a spontaneous positivity of ideas on individual and familiar matters. In the scholastic period, the nearest approach to harmony was a precarious and incomplete equilibrium: and the present transition involves such contradiction that the highest minds are perpetually subject to three incompatible systems. It is impossible to conceive of the contrasting harmony which must arise from all conceptions being fully positive, without the slightest necessary intermixture of any heterogeneous philosophy.