The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

man. And that means Man in his entirety, his thinking, his feeling, his willing; his bodily and his non-bodily attributes—in short, his body, soul, and spirit.

‘Auguste Comte’, wrote the Christian philosopher Solovyov, ‘is the first to deserve the honour and merit of not being satisfied with the clear and well-looking conclusion’ that it is the State which bestows fullness of life on the individual, as man and citizen. Comte, he says, “was one of the first and the few to understand that the nation in its actual empirical reality is essentially relative’. ‘It is a still greater merit and glory of Comte’s that he indicated more clearly, fully and decisively than any of his predecessors that ‘something’ other—the collective whole which, in its inner essence and not merely externally, surpasses every individual man and actually completes him, both ideally and really: he indicated humanity as a living positive unity embracing us, as pre-eminently ‘The Great Being’—‘le Grand Etre’.

As Comte himself puts it:

‘Careful study of the world-order reveals to us the preeminent existence in it of a real Great Being which, as destined continually to perfect that order. and make it conform to itself, represents in the best possible way its true nature. This indubitable Providence, the arbiter of our fate, necessarily becomes the common centre of our feelings, thoughts and actions’.

To Solovyov this vision of Comte’s, though only half understood by Comte himself, represents the very essence of Christianity; and in the current efforts of Christianity to understand itselfthat is to say, to become thinkable and actable, and to build a bridge between the Churches and the rest of the world—we can see that there is an essential place for the vision of the Order of Mankind as seen by Auguste Comte.

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