To the Fichtean foundations, however, Hegel added one crucial corollary: that the Absolute, or Whole, which is a concrete universal entity, is not static but undergoes a crucial development over time. Hegel called this evolution “the dialectical process” (see dialectic). By stressing it, Hegel accomplished two things: (1) he indicated that reason itself is not eternal but “historical,” and (2) he thereby gave new meaning and relevance to the changing conditions of human society in history—which added to the philosophical task a cultural dimension that it had not possessed before.
The philosopher’s vocation, in Hegel’s view, is to approach the Absolute through consciousness—to recognize it as Spirit expressing and developing itself (“realizing itself” was his own phrase) in all the manifold facets of human life. Struggle is the essence of spiritual existence, and self-enlargement is its goal. For these reasons, the various branches of intellect and culture, enumerated below, become stages in the unfolding of the “World-Spirit”:
The psychological characteristics of human beings (habit, appetite, judgment) representing “Subjective Spirit.”
Human laws, social arrangements, and political institutions (the family, civil society, the state) expressing “Objective Spirit.”
Human art, religion, and philosophy embodying “Absolute Spirit.”
Therefore, what began in Hegel as a metaphysics of the Absolute ended by becoming a total philosophy of human culture. Positivism and social theory in Comte, Mill, and Marx
The absolute idealists wrote as if the Renaissance methodologists of the sciences had never existed. But if in Germany the empirical and scientific tradition in philosophy lay dormant, in France and England in the middle of the 19th century it was very much alive. In France, Auguste Comte wrote his great philosophical history of science, Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42; “Course of Positive Philosophy”; Eng. trans. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte), in six volumes. Influenced by Bacon and the entire school of British empiricism, by the doctrine of progress put forward by Turgot and the marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) during the 18th century, and by the very original social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), Comte called his philosophy “positivism,” by which he meant a philosophy of science so narrow that it denied any validity whatsoever to “knowledge” not derived through the accepted methods of science. But the Cours de philosophie positive made its point not by dialectic but by an appeal to the history of thought, and here Comte presented his two basic ideas:
Auguste Comte, drawing by Tony Toullion, 19th century; in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.H. Roger-Viollet
The notion that the sciences have emerged in strict order, beginning with mathematics and astronomy, followed by physics, chemistry, and biology, and culminating in the new science of sociology, to which Comte was the first to ascribe the name.
The so-called “law of the three stages,” which views thought in every field as passing progressively from superstition to science by first being religious, then abstract, or metaphysical, and finally positive, or scientific.
Comte’s contribution was to initiate an antireligious and an antimetaphysical bias in the philosophy of science that survived into the 20th century.
In mid-19th-century England the chief representative of the empirical tradition from Bacon to Hume was John Stuart Mill. Mill’s theory of knowledge, best represented in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), was not particularly original but rather a judicious combination of the doctrines of Berkeley and Hume; it symbolized his mistrust of vague metaphysics, his denial of the a priori element in knowledge, and his determined opposition to any form of intuitionism. It is in his enormously influential A System of Logic (1843), however, that Mill’s chief theoretical ideas are to be found.
John Stuart Mill, 1884.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (Neg. Co. LC-USZ62-76491)
This work—as part of its subtitle, the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, indicates—was concerned less with formal logic than with scientific methodology. Mill made here the fundamental distinction between deduction and induction, defined induction as the process for discovering and proving general propositions, and presented his “four methods of experimental inquiry” as the heart of the inductive method. These methods were, in fact, only an enlarged and refined version of Francis Bacon’s “tables of discovery.” But the most significant section of A System of Logic was its conclusion, Book VI, On the Logic of the Moral Sciences.
Mill took the experience of the uniformity of nature as the warrant of induction. Here he reaffirmed the belief of Hume that it is possible to apply the principle of causation and the methods of physical science to moral and social phenomena. These may be so complex as to yield only “conditional predictions,” but in this sense there are “social laws.” Thus Comte and Mill agreed on the possibility of a genuine social science.
Mill’s Logic was extremely influential, and it continued to be taught at Oxford and Cambridge well into the 20th century, but in the end his importance lay less in logic and epistemology than in ethics and political philosophy. Mill was the great apostle of political liberalism in the 19th century, a true follower of John Locke. And, just as Locke and Rousseau had represented the liberal and the radical wings of social theory in the early modern period, so Mill and Karl Marx represented the liberal and radical approaches to social reform 100 years later.
Mill was raised by social reformers—his father, James Mill (1773–1836), and Jeremy Bentham. His social theory was an attempt, by gradual means arrived at democratically, to combat the evils of the Industrial Revolution. His ethics, expressed in his Utilitarianism (1861), followed the formulations of Bentham in finding the end of society to consist in the production of the greatest quantity of happiness for its members, but he gave to Bentham’s cruder (but more consistent) doctrines a humanistic and individualistic slant. Thus, the moral self-development of the individual becomes the ultimate value in Mill’s ethics.
This trend was also expressed in his essays On Liberty (1859) and Considerations on Representative Government (1861). In the former he stated the case for the freedom of the individual against “the tyranny of the majority,” presented strong arguments in favour of complete freedom of thought and discussion, and argued that no state or society has the right to prevent the free development of human individuality. In the latter he provided a classic defense for the principle of representative democracy, asked for the adequate representation of minorities, urged renewed public participation in political action for necessary social reforms, and pointed out the dangers of class-oriented, or special-interest, legislation.
A radical counterbalance to Mill’s liberal ideas was provided by the philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary Karl Marx. Prior to 1848, Marx used the Hegelian idea of estrangement (which Hegel had used in a metaphysical sense) to indicate the alienation of the worker from the enjoyment of the products of his labour, the crass treatment of human labour as a mere commodity and human beings as mere things, and the general dehumanization of individuals in a selfish, profit-seeking capitalist society.