Catechisme positiviste

This is Auguste Comte's own catechism of the Religion of Humanity, written by its founder in question and answer form in 1852 to set out his system directly to a general reader, alongside the fuller and more systematic four volume Systeme de politique positive he composed across the same years. It is the founder's own account of his own religion rather than an independent historical or scholarly assessment of it, a fact this record states plainly rather than leaving a reader to infer it from the title. It carries the label positivist religion, Comte's calendar of thirteen months, its catechetical form and its stated motto of order and progress in Comte's own words rather than as later scholars have summarised them, which is exactly what a founder's own primary text is strongest at establishing and exactly where it cannot substitute for an outside historian's account of how the movement was received or organised abroad, including Thomas Henry Huxley's contemporary description of it as Catholicism minus Christianity. Use it for what Comte himself taught; use an independent intellectual history for how the movement was received and organised.