Book IV
Chapter I The Principles of Ethics
In Comte’s system Ethics occupies an intermediate place between theoretical philosophy and politics. Ethics rests upon the philosophy as Politics rests on the principles of Ethics.
Ethics is not an abstract speculative science; it does not therefore belong to the hierarchy of the fundamental sciences. It is true that, at the end of his life, Comte added a seventh to the six sciences of the early list,322 which precisely was ethics, that is to say the science of the laws which govern the emotions, passions, desires, etc., of man considered as an individual. But here it is more a question of ethical psychology than of ethics understood in the sense usual with philosophers. The latter, in Comte’s eyes, never constituted the object of a special science. As a matter of fact, either the laws of moral phenomena are studied, and this research, founded upon the positive knowledge of individual and collective human nature, forms a part of sociology. Or, starting from the knowledge of these laws, we ask ourselves what would be the best use for the power possessed by man of modifying phenomena; in this case it is an art whose rules must be determined. But for these rules to be rationally established, social science itself must be rationally founded. Thus, from the practical as from the speculative point of view, positive ethics depends upon sociology.