THE HIGH PRIEST OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
(1798-1857)
"The positive system will attain its ultimate perfection if men could represent all particular facts as instances of one general law."
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THE HIGH PRIEST OF SOCIAL SCIENCE (1798-1857) "The positive system will attain its ultimate perfection if men could represent all particular facts as instances of one general law." |
By the time Auguste Comte wrote his major works, France had seen the revolution, the autocracy of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy. In an uncertain world, Comte sought orderly change through the application of scientific knowledge to society. His search resulted in a new science of society he dubbed "sociology". A breakdown and attempted suicide interrupted his early career as a teacher at the Ecole Polytechnique, but moral and financial support from admirers in Britain and France allowed him to compose "The Course of Positive Philosophy", a survey of all the scientific knowledge of his day. Comte called his philosophy positivism, because it examined the "progress of the human mind" in a scientific manner which would ensure positive results.
A mathematician by nature and profession, Comte saw the human mind as progressing through orderly and identifiable stages - the theological, the metaphysical, and finally the positive. Careful study of the history of the stages in human development would allow the formulation of laws which determined the pattern of progress. Positive knowledge would allow prediction; prediction would allow enactment of policies good for all of society. Later in his career, Comte sought to create a new secular religion with intellectuals like himself as high priests, with the authority to enact policies which would establish a new moral order based on positive knowledge.
MAJOR WORKS
