The Vital Domain of Animals and the Religious World of Man

Extract

According to Auguste Comte, whose extravagant statements are almost always meaningful, the whole of the physical and mathematical sciences, once integrated into positivist dogma, must become cosmology—or, more properly, he qualifies, geology, in the etymological sense of the word: the study of the earth, of the “human planet,” as the necessary environment “of all the higher functions, vital, social, and moral.” Even astronomy should be no more than “the heavenly study of the human planet, that is to say, the knowledge of our relations with those stars that are liable to affect and destroy our destinies by modifying the conditions of the earth.” His religion is focused on the world, not on the universe.

One cannot understand religion in general, and religious truth or error, save by stressing at the start the fact that, although it goes beyond the narrow confines of Comte's positivism, it flows from the cosmos of the world, the historico-geographical domain of man, not of nature, as an ensemble of the non-temporal laws or laws of the universe, devoid of center, which interests science. Religions contradict the positivist and humanist limitations of Comte. But this contradiction, this transcendence, is intelligible only if we define that which is transcended; and, in order to understand this, we must go all the way back to animal psychology.