The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

time of Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists. There was a creative and reconstructive side to their thinking too; but to collect, synthesize, formulate and advance men’s thought and action after the defeat of Napoleon and in the reactionary climate which followed, was a tremendous challenge. Bridges reminds us that Comte was a contemporary of Shelley’s and ‘his boyhood, like Shelley’s, had been marked by precocious zeal for the widest interests of humanity. Like Shelley,’ says Bridges, ‘he was an ardent Republican, and like him he had very early come to see that the dogmas of the Established Church were unbelievable. But to these conditions he added a vigour and firmness of character which to those who knew him recalled the old Roman type; a tenderness of nature like that of Dante, and a philosophic grasp and breadth which to some of us appears without a parallel since the age of Aristotle.’

From his young man’s five or six years as secretary to the great Saint-Simon, Comte derived major influences and indeed many definite ideas that are sometimes credited to himself alone. SaintSimon’s mind was astonishingly fertile and he was a brilliant continuer of ideas first put forward by the Voltairean Condorcet, but some of them already to be seen in the work of Francis Bacon and of the X VIIth century Italian philosopher Vico, who in some sense anticipated Comte by indicating a law of three stages. Condorcet may claim to have been the first to call for a science of society based upon the study of history and aiming at a verifiable and scientific polity—and this was no later than 1792, six years before Comte was born.

Saint-Simon wrote a ‘Mémoire sur la science de ?homme’ in 1813. In 1817 his big work on Industry included an important contribution by Comte. At his death in 1825 Saint-Simon was working on a book called ‘New Christianity’. It is possible to see that a number of the leading Comteian motifs, and indeed the first conception of Positivism itself, are to be found in Saint-Simon. In his ‘System of Positive Polity’, produced after his “Positive Philosophy’, Comte harshly repudiated what he called the morbid liaison of his youth with a depraved juggler; yet in a letter to a friend (quoted by Durkheim) he had admitted his debt to it and

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