The Great Being (Humanity as the Object of Worship)

Comte point of departure is that the living are always and everywhere governed by the dead. Almost nothing a person uses, thinks with or lives inside was made by anyone now alive: the language, the tools, the laws, the accumulated knowledge and the habits of cooperation are all inherited. The Great Being is that inheritance considered as a single continuing entity, of which the currently living are a thin surface layer.

Membership is earned rather than automatic. Comte held that the Great Being is composed of those whose contribution continues to act beneficially, which excludes both the merely harmful and the merely inert, and includes the unborn as its future constituents. That gives the doctrine its moral edge, since a person becomes part of the Great Being by what they leave behind and not by having existed.

From this follows what Comte called subjective immortality. There is no afterlife in the doctrine, and a person persists only in the memory and the effects they leave in the living, which is why commemoration is treated as a religious duty rather than as sentiment. The system adds two further terms to make a trinity of a kind: the Great Fetish, which is the Earth, and the Great Medium, which is the space in which everything happens. Neither is a deity and neither is worshipped in the way the Great Being is, and both exist in the scheme to give the object of reverence a setting.

Comte did not propose a philosophy with religious overtones. He designed a religion in detail: a priesthood of humanity, sacraments marking the stages of a life from presentation at birth to incorporation into the Great Being some years after death, daily private devotions addressed to three chosen women representing mother, wife and daughter, and temples oriented towards Paris.

The Positivist Calendar replaced the months with thirteen periods of twenty-eight days, each named for a figure of human progress, Moses, Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Caesar, Saint Paul, Charlemagne, Dante, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Descartes, Frederick, Bichat, and each day of the year assigned to a further name, so that the year itself is a commemoration list. Some accounts of the system also record a category of perpetual execration for figures Comte judged to have harmed humanity, Napoleon prominent among them.

Contemporaries found the combination hard to take. Thomas Henry Huxley called it Catholicism minus Christianity, and John Stuart Mill, who admired the earlier work, thought the later religion a warning about where a system can go. It was nevertheless built. Positivist chapels operated in London and Paris, and in Brazil the Igreja Positivista do Brasil erected a temple in Rio de Janeiro that still stands, and Brazilian positivists were influential enough at the founding of the republic that the national flag carries the positivist motto order and progress.