Born  Montpellier, France, 19 January 1798

Died  Paris, France, 5 September 1857

Open image in new window

Best known for inventing the word “sociology” and his “religion of humanity,” Auguste Comte figured significantly in moving Western civilization away from an assumption that the social order must be grounded on religious faith and toward the modern sensibility, which depends on a scientific understanding of the world. Astronomy provided the model for his ideal of a rationally ordered society.

Comte was the eldest child of Louis‐August Comte and Félicité‐Rosalie Boyer. He grew up in the shadow of the French Revolution; the ideals behind it fueled his vision of a society based not on power relationships but on reason – what he came to call “positive politics.” In 1817, the 19‐year‐old Comte became secretary to Claude Henri, Comte de Saint‐Simon, an influential social philosopher. That association ended unhappily in 1824, as Comte's developing views began to conflict more and more with Saint‐Simon's. But Comte was indebted to Saint‐Simon for many of his ideas – often to a degree greater than he was eager to admit.

After leaving Saint‐Simon, Comte became a mathematics tutor and later an admissions examiner at the École Polytechnique. He tried to acquire a tenured professorship several times, but was never successful. In 1824, Comte married Caroline Massin; the union was dissolved in 1842.

The germ of Comte's philosophical ideas first appeared in one of the “Opuscules” he wrote in 1822, while working for Saint‐Simon. This fundamental essay contains the two basic concepts of Comte's positivism in embryonic form – the “law of three stages” and his classification of the sciences. From 1830 through 1842, he was engaged in writing his six‐volume major work, the Cours de philosophie positive (Course in Positive Philosophy).

For Comte, science and scientific facts constituted the only valid way of knowing the world; a religious way of knowing would be for him a self‐deception.

The other component of Comte's positivism was his classification of the sciences in the “necessary and invariable” order by which they became positive: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology. Mathematics was not included by Comte because, as he argued, it lay above and beyond the rest as the basis for all the sciences. He did not consider psychology, which relied too much on introspective observations, to be a science. Much of Comte's major work, the Cours de philosophie positive , was given over to the demonstration that each science was dependent upon the development of the previous one. Citing the achievements of mathematical astronomers Pierre de Laplace and Joseph Lagrange , Comte argued that astronomy must inevitably mature before physics, physics before chemistry, and so forth.

Astronomy lay at the top of the hierarchy, in Comte's judgment, because it was concerned only with the positions and motions of celestial bodies (i. e., to “save the phenomena”). In turn, astronomy's role as an observational, rather than experimental, science carried another important implication for Comte. He considered it an impossibility that astronomers would ever learn the composition of celestial bodies. Less than a generation later, however, his “prediction” was rudely overturned by the emergent science of astrophysics, led by the pioneering spectral analysis of chemists Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff.

Comte looked upon the mathematical precision and certainty of astronomy as a model for a more rational society, and he furthered the idea that science, rather than religion, could become the foundation of the social order. The remainder of Comte's life was devoted to establishing a “positive religion” or “religion of humanity,” complete with a calendar of “positive saints” and a catechism. Zoologist Thomas Henry Huxley once characterized Comte's “religion of humanity” as “Catholicism minus Christianity.”

Despite its shortcomings, Comte's philosophy influenced many important thinkers throughout the 19th century, including John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer, and George Henry Lewes. Although the 20th‐century movement known as “logical positivism” was to some extent an outgrowth of Comte's philosophy, its concerns generally lay beyond Comte's purview. Indirectly, Comte's ideas furthered the rise of the scientific intelligentsia and its separation from the humanistic intellectual tradition, a dichotomy that was identified in C. P. Snow's famous 1959 essay, “The Two Cultures.”