The French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) developed a secular religion known as positivism, which emphasized reason and logic. He later systematized it 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. 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.
Major Works
The "Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société" (1822 — the "fundamental opuscule").
The Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842); English translation & condensation The Positive Philosophy of August Comte, by Harriet Martineau (1853).
The complete Système de politique positive, ou Traité de Sociologie instituant la Religion de l'Humanité (1851-1854); English translation, The System of Positive Polity, by J.H. Bridges, Frederick Harrison, et. al., 1875-77.
The Synthèse subjective, ou Système universel des conceptions propres à l'état normal de l'Humanité, of which he completed only the the first volume before his death in 1857.
Also crucially important to his influence in Victorian England was John Stuart Mill's Auguste Comte and Positivism (1866).
Content last updated: 1988; link last added 27 October 2002