Auguste Comte

Comte's central claim is a developmental one. Every branch of human knowledge, he held, passes through three stages. In the theological stage, events are explained by the will of personal beings, spirits or gods. In the metaphysical stage, the gods are replaced by abstractions, essences and forces, which he regarded as gods with the personality drained out. In the positive stage, the search for ultimate causes is abandoned altogether and enquiry confines itself to the laws that relate observable phenomena to one another.

The sciences reach that third stage at different times, in an order fixed by how complex and how close to human concerns their subject is: mathematics first, then astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and last of all the study of society. That final science had no name, so he supplied one, coining sociologie in the fourth volume of the Cours de philosophie positive. He coined altruisme too, and the pairing matters: the new science was to supply the knowledge on which a reorganised society would rest, and the new morality was to supply its motive.

The scheme has not worn well as history, since the stages do not appear in that order in any actual society and theology has not obliged by disappearing. It has worn extremely well as a founding statement, and the discipline that got its name from him has never quite stopped arguing with the account of itself he gave it.

Having concluded that the theological stage was over, Comte drew a conclusion most of his admirers found insupportable: that the social functions religion had performed were still necessary, and that positivism would therefore have to perform them. From the 1840s he set about designing a cult in detail.

Its object of worship is the Great Being, Humanity itself, understood as the continuous community of the living, the dead and those still to come, to whom every individual owes almost everything he has. There is a Positivist Calendar of thirteen months of twenty eight days, each month named after a great figure, with individual days assigned to lesser ones, so that the year becomes a walk through the history of human achievement. There are nine sacraments marking the stages of a life, a priesthood of positivist philosophers, temples, and a formula that summarises the whole: love as the principle, order as the basis, progress as the end.

The reception split his movement. Thomas Henry Huxley's verdict, that positivism was Catholicism minus Christianity, is the line everyone remembers, and John Stuart Mill, who had admired the earlier work, treated the later system as a warning. Yet it was not a private eccentricity. Positivist churches were founded in France and England, and in Brazil the movement became a political force: a Positivist temple still stands in Rio de Janeiro, and the words on the Brazilian flag, Ordem e Progresso, are taken from Comte's formula.