The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

relevant to one of our main educational problems of today, when he says:

An intelligent person who wishes at the present day to study the principal branches of Natural Philosophy, in order to acquire a general system of positive ideas, is obliged to study each separate science in the same way and with the same amount of detail as if he wished to become an astronomical or chemical specialist, etc. This renders such an education almost impossible and necessarily very imperfect, even in the case of the most intelligent minds, placed in the most favourable circumstances’. The significance of this remark is enhanced later on, when he

says:

i “The great political and moral crisis of existing societies is due

at bottom to intellectual anarchy. Our gravest evil consists,

indeed, in this profound divergence which now exists among all minds, with regard to all the fundamental maxims whose fixity is the first condition of a true social order’.

Comte, by the whole trend of his thinking, looks to a historical order of classification for the sciences, but keeps in view at the same time a logical order based on decreasing generalisation.

‘Thus it appears to me unquestionable that in the general system of the Sciences, Astronomy should be placed before Physics (properly so called); and yet several branches of physics, especially optics, are indispensable to the complete exposition of astronomy’.

Nevertheless he is able to sum up:

‘Physicists who have not first studied Astronomy, at least under its general aspect; Chemists, who before applying themselves to their special science, have not previously studied Astronomy and then Physics; Physiologists who have not prepared themselves for their special labours by a preliminary study of Astronomy, Physics and Chemistry; all these lack one of the fundamental conditions of their intellectual development. This is still more evident in the case of students who wish to devote themselves to the positive study of Social phenomena, without having in the first place acquired a general knowledge of Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry and Physiology’.

The synoptic view of the sciences thus worked out by Comte