The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

Geddes, have been allowed to drop. An example of these principles is the attention given to Spiritual and Temporal powers, and. the right relationship between them. Solovyov takes this distinction very seriously and traces it as a mainspring of European history. Another is the factors State, Family and Church. It is necessary for us to make the effort to follow him in the processes of thought and vision which led him from his Positive Philosophy to his Positive Polity and thence to the Religion of Humanity, with its implication of a New Order which was to be the final Order of Man, through its expression, in social and cultural forms, of the essential and unchanging functions of the Being Man.

In his ethical teaching and in the rituals and social sacraments of the Religion of Humanity, Comte maintains a theoretical basis consistent with his whole Positive philosophy. But, as Caird points out: ‘Comte’s own theory, like every intelligible view of the world, involves a metaphysic and ends in a theology’. Caird emphasises that ‘Comte is not simply an agnostic; he doesnot deny the reality of the wants which Metaphysics and Theology have hitherto striven to satisfy; nor does he hold that these wants are, by the nature of things and of the human intelligence, for ever precluded from satisfaction’. What he does maintain is that it is the function of Religion to unify, and he believes that correct thinking has led him to a conception of Religion which is universal and final. Some of his ethical precepts show how warmly as well as deeply he considered human needs and the surest ways of meeting them, as for example:

‘Act from affection, and think in order to act’, (or as its original metrical form has been rendered in English‘Action from impulse springs; thought guides the act’.) or ‘Live for others; live openly’. or ‘Between the World and Man, we need Humanity’.

He believed that Humanity depended for its fulfilment on the element of affection, devotion and self-sacrifice which he saw as represented by Woman. (It should be understood that he always spoke of Le Grand Etre as a feminine being, and it was sometimes represented in his followers’ meeting-places by a reproduction of the Sistine Madonna. Solovyov has a most interesting discussion

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