222 A Positive Century (1815–1914)Th is principled rejection of natural law lay at the heart of the positivist
philosophy of international law. It was not, in reality, a single philosophy. It
came in three quite distinct variations. But those variations were capable of
intermingling— if not always very harmoniously— into a broad, if loose,
synthesis to which the label “mainstream positivism” will be given.Dethroning the Law of Nature
Th e self- proclaimed inventor and champion of the “positive philosophy”
was an imaginative and eccentric French writer named Auguste Comte,
who expounded it, at six- volume length, in 1830– 42. He presented it as the
third and culminating stage in the evolution of the collective human mind.
It was contrasted to the two benighted eras that had preceded it: the theologi-
cal and the metaphysical. In the theological age, priesthoods and religious-
based systems generally were in the dominant position. Metaphysical rea-
soning was seen as the preserve, most outstandingly, of lawyers— meaning
natural lawyers, who dealt, in hypothetico- deductive fashion, with abstract
principles and “absolute notions” of various kinds. Th e positive approach, in
contrast, focused on immediate causation for its explanations, and not on
appeals to ultimate fi rst principles.
Comte was not the fi rst person to think in these terms. He had an emi-
nent medieval forebear in the fourteenth- century En glish phi los o pher Wil-
liam of Ockham, who championed what he called “real science,” as opposed
to the prevailing “rational science.” Real science dealt with individual con-
crete things and was founded on observation and experiment. Rational sci-
ence, in contrast, dealt with concepts and propositions and abstractions. Its
dominant method was logic. Th e opinions of William of Ockham, to put it
mildly, did not prevail in his time. He was accused of heresy (though was
apparently carried off by the Black Death before his trial could take place).
Comte was optimistic that, in the nineteenth century, the time at last was
ripe for the triumph of real science over its rational foe. His positive philoso-
phy, like William of Ockham’s real science, envisaged taking the world as it
found it, in all its concreteness and richness, and investigating it with an
open mind, divested of the mystical philosophical baggage of the theolo-
gians and the metaphysicians.