Comte and Positivism

Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin

he French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) developed a secular religion known as positivism, which emphasized reason and logic, that he later systematized as the Religion of Humanity, complete with priests and a calendar of saints.

Comte divided the progress of mankind into three historical stages:

Theological: relies on supernatural agencies to explain what man can't explain otherwise.
Metaphysical: man attributes effects to abstract but poorly understood causes.
"Positive": because man now understands the scientific laws which control the world.

Comte also founded the social sciences, and it is important to remember in our more cynical times the ideals to which they aspired. Comte and other early social scientists assumed that human behavior must obey laws just as strict as Newton's laws of motion, and that if we could discover them, we could eliminate moral evils -- in exactly the same way that medical scientists were then discovering how diseases worked and were eliminating much of the physical suffering which had always been an inevitable part of the human condition.

Comte left three major works, the Système de politique positive (1823), the notes for his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842), and the complete Système de politique positive (1851-1854). In his earlier, less systematic works he influenced such figures as J.S. Mill, T.H. Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and George Eliot; all gradually fell away as his philosophy became more rigidly systematic.