Personalism

"Early in the last century, M. Comte, the founder of French positivism, set forth his famous doctrine of the three stages of human thought. Man begins, he said, in the theological stage, when all phenomena are referred to wills, either in things or beyond them. After a while, through the discovery of law, the element of caprice and arbitrariness, and thus of will, is ruled out, and men pass to the second, or metaphysical stage. Here they explain phenomena by abstract conceptions of being, substance, cause, and the like. But these metaphysical conceptions are really only the ghosts of the earlier theological notions, and disappear upon criticism. When this is seen, thought passes into the third and last stage of development, the positive stage. Here men give up all inquiry into metaphysics as bootless, and content themselves with discovering and registering the uniformities of coexistence and sequence among phenomena. When this is done we have accomplished all that is possible in the nature of the case. Metaphysics is ruled out as a source of barren and misleading illusions, and science is installed in its place as a study of the uniformities of coexistence and sequence which are revealed in experience. In this view Comte was partly right and partly wrong. By explanation Comte understood causal explanation, and he was quite right in pointing out that explanation in terms of personality is the one with which men begin. He was equally right in saying that abstract metaphysics is only the ghost of the earlier personal explanations. Later philosophic criticism has shown that the conceptions of impersonal metaphysics are only the abstract forms of the self-conscious life, and that apart from that life they are empty and illusory. Comte was equally right in restricting positive science to the investigation and registration of the orders of coexistence and sequence in experience. But he was wrong in making caprice and arbitrariness essential marks of will, and equally wrong in rejecting all causal inquiry. The history of thought has judged his doctrine in this respect. Causal inquiry, though driven out with a fork, has always come running back, and always will. It only remains to give the causal doctrine the form which is necessary to free it from the objections of criticism. The aim of these lectures is to show that critical reflection brings us back again to the personal metaphysics which Comte rejected. We agree with him that abstract and impersonal metaphysics is a mirage of formal ideas, and even largely of words, which begin, continue, and end in abstraction and confusion. Causal explanation must always be in terms of personality, or it must vanish altogether. Thus we return to the theological stage, but we do so with a difference. Our notions of knowledge and its nature, our conception of reality and causality, our thoughts respecting space and time--the two great intimidating phantoms--these are the things that decide our general way of thinking and give direction to our thought even in morals and religion. Some harmless-looking doctrine is put forth in epistemology, and soon there is an agnostic chill in the air that is fatal to the highest spiritual faiths of the soul, or some sensual blight and mildew spread over the fairer growths of our nature. Space and time are made supreme laws of existence, and determinism and materialism and atheism are at the door"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).