THE UNIVERSE OF INFORMATION.pdf - ideals

iology, and everything that came before culminated in psychology
and sociology. Sociology, the queen of sciences, was
viewed as a «unifying» science. What was of primary importance
for the positivist philosopher was the formation of a
^subjective synthesis» of positive knowledge as a way of envisaging
and directing the development of society-
Having worked his way up the ladder of the sciences by the appropriate
objective methods, the philosopher having scaled the heights of sociology,
could then travel down the ladder again and construct a
synthesis of them in the light of the unique and essential insight into
the inferior sciences afforded by sociology and bearing in mind the
requirements of humanity revealed by it. 3
The enduring importance of Positivism for the nineteenth century
lay in its emphasis on the scientific method, in its rejection
of metaphysics, in its utilitarian ethic of good for Humanity,
in its claims for sociology, a word coined by Comte, and
in its belief in the possibility, the necessity, for synthesis.
This last, the notion of synthesis, is an essential feature of
Positivism. For Comte «positive generalities* were able to organise
all of human reality as manifested in history and would
lead it gradually towards some kind of unity. One commentator,
Pierre Ducassee, has put it this way:
The positivistic mind coordinates all that is certain, real, useful, precise,
but from a relative and organic point of view relative to man considered
in his intellectual history, and relative to man conceived of as
bearing social values; organic by virtue of the continuing preponderance
of the sociological point of view, the source of the conception of
ensemble, the veritable synoptic centre of positive knowledge and
moral action. 4
In Ducassee's opinion the whole of Comte's life and work
was a battle against dispersive specialisms, for Comte emphasised,
above all, «the art of coordination, of the correlation of
analysis with synthesis, the prudent, precise, generalising assimilation
of the results of contemporary science*. 5
Positivism enjoyed some popularity in England, as elsewhere,
both for its own sake, and as something in opposition
"to which other positions could be defined. Herbert Spencer
saw his position as opposed to Comtian Positivism. 6 Yet it
showed many points of similarity. Spencer firmly believed in
the possibility of obtaining positive knowledge and in the value
of synthesising it. Indeed, for him philosophy was no less
than «completely unified knowledge*. 7 He was led from considering
the essential phenomena of Matter and Motion to the
problem of the persistence of Force, and from there to the
Laws of Evolution in terms of which all knowledge could be
unified. The Laws of Evolution hold true, he asserted, for each
order of existence and he went on doggedly in the decades
after his First Principles of a New System of Philosophy
to «interpret the detailed phenomena of Life, Mind and Society
.26