COMTE - THE ANSWERS

<BODY> <CENTER><FONT SIZE=5><B>COMTE<BR> THE HIGH PRIEST OF SOCIAL SCIENCE</B></FONT></CENTER><P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>All is Revealed</B></FONT><P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>POSITIVISM</B></FONT><BR> Comte called his philosophy <A HREF="../t03/g039.html" TARGET="_top">positivism</A> because it examined the "progress of the human mind" in a scientific manner. Certainty, positive results, had to be the outcome because of the methodology proposed. "The first characteristic of positivism is that it regards all things as subject to invariable laws. Our business is to pursue an accurate discovery of those laws." Truth was not to be attained through abstract speculation or pure intellectual philosophizing. All knowledge must be based on rigorous use of evidence or experimentation. None of this was new. What was radical was application of the positivist faith in discoverable laws to <B>social phenomena</B>. Thus was born a new science - sociology.<P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>THREE STAGE LAW</B></FONT><BR> "From the study of the development of human understanding, in all directions and through all times, the discovery arises of a fundamental law. The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes through three different theoretical conditions: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, the scientific or positive. This fundamental law should henceforth be, in my opinion, the starting point of all philosophical researches about man and society."<P> Man's thought evolves through three stages - theological, metaphysical, and finally positive. The sciences differ in complexity, this in turn being determined by their dependence on other sciences. Astronomy is the simplest, with little dependence on other sciences. Sociology is the most complex and highly interdependent. Being the most complex, sociology will take the greatest time to attain the positive stage, but this is the ultimate aim.<P> <FONT SIZE=4><B>CHANGING VIEWS OF VENUS</B></FONT><P> <CENTER><IMG SRC="1704a.jpg" WIDTH="280" HEIGHT="185" ALT="THREE STAGE LAW"></CENTER><P> Early civilisations associated the planets with various gods and goddesses - theological stage. Early speculation about planetary movement followed Pythagorean theory about the harmony of the spheres and assumed that the planets moved in perfect circular orbits in a pattern that matched the musical intervals of the scale. Even Copernicus, who advanced scientific understanding by placing the sun, not the earth, at the centre of our planetary system, followed this pattern of thought - metaphysical stage. As Comte predicted, astronomy is one of the first sciences to achieve something like the positive stage, with probes taking photographs from space and collecting data on the planets themselves. <BR clear=left><BR> <HR width=100%> <A HREF="http://www.creatorix.com.au"><IMG SRC="../creatorix.gif" WIDTH="85" HEIGHT="40" BORDER="0" ALT="Creatorix" align=right></A> </BODY>