COMTE, AUGUSTE. — Philosopher, born in Montpellier on 19 January 1798, died in Paris on 5 September 1857. Of a Catholic and royalist family. In 1806 he entered the lycée of Montpellier, where he remained until 1814; there he lost his faith and became a republican. From 1814 to 1816 he attended the École Polytechnique. Decisive for his thought was the acquaintance, made in 1817, with Saint-Simon, of whom he became an enthusiastic secretary and collaborator for several years; then he broke off relations with him noisily. The plan of his future works and the nature of his mind are already visible in the pamphlet of 1822: *Prospectus des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société*. In 1830 the first volume of his famous *Cours*
Ecclesiastical Computation. — Incipit of *De temporum ratione*, by St. Bede the Venerable, codex from the Monastery of St. Nazarius of Lorsch, second half of the 11th century — Vatican Library, Cod. Pal. Lat. 1449, f. 30r.
de philosophie positive appeared, of which the sixth and final volume was published in 1842. In October 1844 he met Clotilde de Vaux (who lived separated from her husband and died in 1846), whom he almost deified. From this time begins a new phase in the activity of C. as a thinker, who, returning to his original inspiration strengthened by the influence of Saint-Simonianism, conceived his philosophical system as a premise for a vast plan of social, moral, political, and religious reform: hence his *Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l'humanité* (4 vols., Paris 1851–54). In 1848 he founded a Positive Society and a kind of Church, which recognized Humanity as the new divinity and C. as its high priest. In 1852 C.’s *Catéchisme positive, ou sommaire exposition de la religion universelle, en onze entretiens systematiques entre une femme et un prêtre de l'humanité* was published. His last great work is the *Synthèse subjective, ou Système universel des conceptions propres à l'état normal de l'humanité* (1856). Not all his friends and disciples wished to follow him in this second phase: among them should be mentioned Littré, his most important disciple, and Mill (the correspondence with the latter and with Valat has been published in separate volumes). In his will he stipulated that his apartment (rue Monsieur-le-Prince) should remain the seat of the new religion: indeed, his surviving disciples celebrate the anniversary there. Cf. *Testament d'A. C. avec les documents qui s'y rapportent, pièces justificatives, prières quotidiennes, confessions annuelles, correspondance avec m.me de Vaux* (1884, 2nd ed. 1866, with a *Addition secrète*).
His *Cours* (which is on the Index, decree of 12 Dec. 1864) begins with the celebrated law of the three states: theological, metaphysical, and positive (precedents for this idea can be traced in Vico, in D’Alembert, in Turgot, and in the Hegel then popularized by Cousin). In the first period of civilization (and of every human knowledge) man seeks fancifully to explain phenomena through the intervention of supernatural beings conceived anthropomorphically. In the second period such supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces or entities, which in each group of phenomena appear as their mysterious causes. In the positive period the human spirit, recognizing the futility of those notions, renounces the investigation of causal essences and seeks only, through observation and reasoning, to discover the actual laws, that is, the invariable relations between facts. The relation between particular phenomena and certain general facts constitutes, precisely, the law, which is like a more constant fact, thus allowing the prediction of particulars: *savoir pour prévoir*. There is no science of the absolute, but only of the relative: “All is relative: this is the only principle that is absolute” (thus, as early as 1817). C. may therefore be rightly considered the founder of positivism, which later invaded European culture and, especially with Spencer, achieved its greatest triumph in the second half of the century. Far from any contact with Kantian transcendental criticism (ignored or known only through Cousin’s writings), C. nevertheless coincides with Kantian criticism in its polemic against traditional metaphysics and in the immanentism of its principles. The crucial difference is this: whereas Kantian criticism salvages the Cartesian principle of self-consciousness, from which the new metaphysics of idealism will take its starting point, positivism, fearing a relapse into the previous metaphysics, denies from the outset any scientific value to psychology, even if understood merely as empirical introspection, since (as C. expresses it) it is not possible for the brain to have the function both of thinking and of observing that it thinks. Observation can only be made of others. Thus, this positivism, although declaring itself opposed to every metaphysics, whether spiritualist or materialist, clearly inclines toward the latter.
Another no less famous doctrine of C. is that of the hierarchical relation of the sciences, forming a system that proceeds from the simplest and most general facts, such as those of mathematics, through increasing complexity and decreasing generality, to astronomy, to physics and chemistry, to biology, and finally to the social sciences. Mathematics was the first to reach the positive stage; biology had only recently entered that stage; it remained to found “sociology,” the new science (here one is reminded of our Vico). It is announced by C. as the basis and crown of the entire system, and the proper object of philosophy. On the other hand, insofar as sociology is conceived as a particular science needing to be brought to the positivity of the other sciences within the total system of science, it is this total system that becomes the proper object of philosophy, whose task is to organize all the sciences into a general synthetic view, dominated by a unitary concept of method and doctrine. Here arises the not easily resolved problem of this unity. Since every a priori is here banished, it can only be a matter of a coherence or analogical harmony of the whole.
Thus, this encyclopedia or system of science, in aiming to culminate in a sociology, transforms its previous objectivism into a subjectivism or humanism no longer hostile to any form of spiritualism. The concept arises of man as a historical-social formation, which derives from the environment (hence the celebrated theory of the *milieu social*) the reason for its intellectual and moral activity. The uncertainty of the concept of this new science, between naturalism and spiritualism, has meant that positivist sociology, in C. and in the numerous school of his followers (some of them of great value), oscillated between a biological conception and a historicist one, which anticipates more modern views in which the idea of civilization and of properly human progress is firmly held. In him, obviously, these views are limited to the problems of his time, when there fermented the new ideas of an economic reform of society, to be founded on the development of industry (no longer on military power) and on the expansion of liberal institutions. This is the period of preparation for socialism, which blossomed in the work of Marx, as is well known.
The intellectualism of the preceding philosophy, in which social progress is also entrusted to the guidance of scientific knowledge, is decisively surpassed in its final phase by the Romantic motif that has become prevalent within it: now it is the affective element, feeling, the heart, that becomes the primary principle of human social life, and the new moral law is expressed in the oft-repeated motto of C.: *vivere pour autrui*. In this, too, there is revealed the new religious intuition, seemingly purely Christian, of humanity. Religion becomes the social organ par excellence, as that which is the life of pure love, the elevation and sanctification of the instincts proper to human nature—instincts that would, in themselves, lead to individuation and egoism—while the moral progress of man consists in overcoming them and subordinating the freedoms of the individual to the demands of communal life. Insofar as this communal life is conceived as founded upon a religious sentiment, every form of utilitarianism and economism is rejected. The individual must be mediated within humanity, which is the Great Being, the new divinity, continuous, which ensures (subjective) immortality in the memory of future generations to its benefactors and adorers, to those who have lived for the progress of civilization. The priests of this religion (the positivist philosophers) constitute the spiritual power, which must not command but guide, with science and moral example, the temporal power. Unaware of the caricature to which he was exposing this new religion, in 1851 he wrote calmly: «I am persuaded that before 1860 I shall preach positivism as the only real and complete religion at Notre-Dame.»
Meanwhile, in the amalgam of motifs, at least apparently contrasting (due in large part to the historical period), C. declares himself opposed to all Enlightenment literature and to Protestantism. He sees in the French Revolution the triumph of intellectual and moral anarchism, and opposes the bourgeois movement as its derivative. No longer the abstract metaphysics of rights, but the new civilization will know no other right than that of doing one’s duty. The productive forces of wealth will indeed be guided by science, but man in his social foundation will henceforth be represented by the proletariat, while the feminine class, by reason of the affective element predominant in it and its maternal function, will have the sacred task of preserving in man the sentiment of humanity.