The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

our debt to them; to feel our continuity with them. It lies therefore at the very root of the religion of Humanity’. It is curious to note that of the three stages into which the Theological stage is subdivided—Fetichism, Polytheism, and Monotheism—it seems to be what Comte calls Fetichism that comes nearest to his active sympathy. As Bridges puts it “The affinity between Fetichism and Positivism is one of the most impressive and fertile conceptions of his philosophy’. Comte sees in this light all the manifestations in which our reverence and love flow over from animate to inanimate things—as they do in the poetry of a Wordsworth or the prose of a John Cowper Powys. This particularly applies to everything associated with the great figures of Humanity.

In this spirit Comte drew up a reformed calendar (one aspect of which, a fixed date for every day of the year, has just been agreed by the Vatican Council), and he used it as a way of bringing home to his followers how literally he meant them, and wished for all men, to practise the truly religious activity of veneration. He called his thirteen months after the thirteen great men whose contribution seemed to him the most significant in the history of humanity. Others were remembered each week, and indeed there was one for each day, the first day of the year being set aside as a sort of All Saints Day. (Incidentally, for those who are curious to know what he thought of us islanders, more than sixty of his selection of great men are British). In all of this we see how seriously and how concretely he takes his vision of Humanity, a somewhat similar view of which emerges at about the same time in the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach.

The seven Sacraments of the Church of Humanity have already been referred to. Together with the regular veneration of the great figures of Humanity, the main practice of the Positivist religion, as such, was prayer. This, naturally enough, was to be undone as an extended expression of veneration, adoration and dedication of one’s powers to the service of Humanity, and not a supplication for benefits to be received. Fine examples of such devotions are to be found among the published writings of Dr. Bridges. The finest statement of Comte’s considered attitude to religion is in his own words, at the beginning of the last volume he lived to write. It was a treatise on mathematics, intended to be

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