French Positivism

AUGUST COMTE

Life and Works

Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, was born in Montpellier in 1798. He studied in the Polytechnical School of Paris, where he later became a professor. His spiritual master was Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), whose aspiration it was to reconstruct the social unity of the Middle Ages, which had been destroyed first by Protestantism and then by the French Revolution. The new social unity was to be built upon a different basis, namely, science. From his friendship with Saint-Simon, Comte gleaned certain radical ideas of social reform which animated his entire life. Comte died in 1857.

The best works of Comte are: Cours de Philosophie Positive (Course of Positive Philosophy), and Systeme de Politique Positive (System of Positive Polity).

Doctrine

Comte undertook to reconstruct the social and political organization, not on a religious or political basis but with science as its foundation. His starting point is an observation or examination of historico-social reality. Humanity, according to Comte, possesses certain laws of evolution, according to which it passes, as it were, through three stages: theological, metaphysical and positive.

• In the theological stage, men, under the influence of imagination, seek an explanation of all phenomena in the will of supernatural beings whom they conceive mythically.

• In the metaphysical stage, intelligence masters imagination. Metaphysics then supplants religion, and man seeks an explanation of phenomena in the occult forces of nature, namely, in the vital force, the chemical force, the substantial form, etc.

• In the third stage it is science which gains supremacy over philosophy. This is the positive stage. No longer is there a search for entities that surpass experience. Now, efforts are put forth to establish the constant relationships of phenomena and to refer particular relationships to those that are more general.

Comte also bases his classification of the sciences on the law of the three stages of humanity. All the sciences -- mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and sociology -- pass through the same three stages and finally reach the positive stage. They reach the positive stage in the order of their grade of complexity. Thus the first to reach the positive stage was mathematics; sociology, because it treats of more concrete and complex phenomena is the last to reach it. It is hence the task of philosophy to establish a "social physics" which will free the science of sociology from the theological and metaphysical prejudices that still corrupt it.

The last years of Comte's life were marked by religious fervor. To be sure, his was a positivist religion which he established by aping Catholicism. This new religion had as its object the cult of the Great Being (humanity, made up of all men, past, present, and future), the Great Medium (world-space), and the Great Fetish (the earth). All three together form the positivist trinity. Positivist religion had its temple, its hierarchical priesthood, its positivist dogmas, organized worship, sacraments, and even its calendar -- all modeled on Catholicism. The new cult had Paris had its center; from there the cult spread to England, to Sweden, and to Brazil and Chile.