618 PSYCHOLOGY 



its victory more complete, than in England and Germany. This 

 difference is due, I think, to the different attitudes taken in these 

 countries respectively toward the theory and practice of religion. 

 In France, the theological bias and restraint, in which a certain 

 conception of the mental principle was involved, were done away 

 with before and during the revolution; and a positive scientific 

 method was resorted to, to replace the theological as witness 

 Comte's actual attempt at a religion of humanity. In England, 

 Germany, and America, on the contrary, while the growth of natural- 

 ism has gone on apace, the actual realization of scientific method 

 has been slow and difficult. Such a step involves the giving-up of 

 vitalism and the theory of interaction of mind and body, together 

 with other formulations in which the theological spirit has lately 

 taken its stand. 



In Auguste Comte we have a thinker whose dualism was ripe for 

 a scientific psychology, but who nevertheless failed to achieve the 

 point of view of law-abiding or subjective change. Comte was assez 

 positif in his claim. He took up the problem of an independent 

 science of psychic processes; but from failure to recognize the sub- 

 jective as such, denied its possibility. His objective monism is seen 

 in his view that it is through the objective or positive series of facts, 

 biological and social, that the psychic series is to be done justice to, 

 classified, arranged, and explained. 1 It is the reverse swing of the 

 pendulum to that of subjectivism, though from a different theoretical 

 support. It does not solve the dualism; as the idealistic monisms 

 of Plato and Spinoza did not. And it parallels practically the same 

 stage of individual reflection as these systems: that which recog- 

 nizes the futility of the half-mature dualisms of practice and common 

 sense. But in Comte the practical and the methodological were 

 prominent, and he was urged on to justify the sort of naturalism in 

 which these two motives issued. This he did by asserting the essen- 

 tial fragmentariness and capriciousness of the psychic as such; while 

 he should have held to a larger naturalism, in which the external 

 and the psychic each develops its own positive method. 2 Of course 

 it is no reconciliation of two terms to deny one of them; and such 

 a procedure has not the merit of esthetic synthesis which we find in 

 the great monisms. But nevertheless, the assertion of the universal 

 claim of positive method was of the first importance: it carried 

 forward one of the great naturalistic movements of history. 



While the fruitfulness of the positivism of Comte was thus in 

 science in general, not directly in psychology, yet it was only his 



1 His inconsistency ia seen in his appeal to the subjectivism of Kant's relativ- 

 ism of knowledge to refute metaphysics, while using the objective order to re- 

 fute the subjective point of view of Condillac and the spiritualistic school. 



* This was done by the school of English positivists who followed Comte in 

 his attitude toward metaphysics. 



