Note (return) — Chapter VI

Comte, however, is determined to treat the idea of causation as an illusion, whether under its psychological form, as will, or under its scientific form, as force. He feels that Theology is inevitable if we permit the inquiry into causes; 252 and he is more anxious that theology should perish than that truth should prevail. The human will must, therefore, be robbed of all semblance of freedom, lest it should suggest the idea of a Supreme Will governing nature; and human action, like all other phenomena, must be reduced to uniform and necessary law. All feelings, ideas, and principles guaranteed to us by consciousness are to be cast out of the account. Psychology, resting on self-observation, is pronounced a delusion. The immediate consciousness of freedom is a dream. Such a procedure, to say the least of it, is highly unphilosophical; to say the truth about it, it is obviously dishonest. Every fact of human nature, just as much as every fact of physical nature, must be accepted in all its integrity, or all must be alike rejected. The phenomena of mind can no more be disregarded than the phenomena of matter. Rational intuitions, necessary and universal beliefs, can no more be ignored than the uniform facts of sense-perception, without rendering a system of knowledge necessarily incomplete, and a system of truth utterly impossible. Every one truth is connected with every other truth in the universe. And yet Comte demands that a large class of facts, the most immediate and direct of all our cognitions, shall be rejected because they are not in harmony with the fundamental assumption of the positive philosophy that all knowledge is confined to phenomena perceptible to sense. Now it were just as easy to cast the Alps into the Mediterranean as to obliterate from the human intelligence the primary cognitions of immediate consciousness, or to relegate the human reason from the necessary laws of thought. Comte himself can not emancipate his own mind from a belief in the validity of the testimony of consciousness. How can he know himself as distinct from nature, as a living person, as the same being he was ten years ago, or even yesterday, except by an appeal to consciousness? Despite his earnestly-avowed opinions as to the inutility and fallaciousness of all psychological inquiries, he is compelled to admit that "the phenomena of life" are "known by immediate consciousness." 253 Now the knowledge of our personal freedom rests on precisely the same grounds as the knowledge of our personal existence. The same "immediate consciousness" which attests that I exist, attests also, with equal distinctness and directness, that I am self-determined and free.