Personalism
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 per- sonal 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 Olusory.
Comte was equally right in restricting positive science to the in-investigation and registration of the orders of coexistence and sequence in experience. But he was wrong in making caprice and arbitrariness essential marks of wiU, 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. At last, we have learned the lesson of law, and we now see that law and will be united in our thought of the world. Thus man's earliest metaphysics reemerges in his latest; but enlarged, enriched, and purified by the ages of thought and experience.
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