The Significance of Comte

T HE purpose of this paper, presented on the one-hundredth anniversary of Comte's completion of his most famous work, The Positive Philosophy, is not to make a hero of the author, but to estimate his significance and to characterize as impartially as possible his work and genius. There was not much in Comte's personality which would entitle him to be considered a hero in the popular sense, nor would he have cared to be so regarded. But as a thinker, whatever merits future generations may assign to him in this category, he exerted a profound influence on his century and on the trend of philosophic thought. It was at one time customary to refer to him as the founder of sociology, mainly perhaps because he had invented that term in 1838 or 1839 in order to have a concrete one-word characterization of the new and ultimate science of society which he had placed at the head of his hierarchy of the sciences and had formerly called Social Physics. But, now that we know more about the origins of sociology and of the social sciences in general, we can no longer look upon Comte as the founder of sociology, or even as a very assiduous and successful cultivator of that science. He wrote no treatise as such on general sociology. He would be more clearly entitled to the characterization of social philosopher in its broader application or even to that of sociologist of religion or social reformer. In these latter fields he exerted a very great influence. For that matter, his significance for sociology was most profound, although his direct contribution to the subject was not remarkable. For the sake of convenience and clarity I shall approach my subject under a number of subsidiary headings. Naturally the first of these is the biographical material, which may be made very brief. August Comte was born of conventional Catholic parents at Montpelier, France, January 19, 1798 and grew to early manhood there. He was of middle class origin and received a middle class education of not very ample proportions. Like almost every Frenchman, he looked to Paris as the fountain of opportunity and before he was yet out of his teens he found himself in that city, wnere at first he encountered not opportunity, but hunger and other forms of want. Here he studied mathematics, the most respectable of all the sciences in an age and a country dominated scientifically by the brilliant work of La Place. Ultimately he became examiner and tutor in the Ecole Polytechnique, the engineering college of Paris. He of course lived in the Latin Quarter, which surrounds the University and abuts upon the Ecole Polytechnique. Here were gathered the radical minds of the Revolution, which was scarcely over, and. those post-revolutionary reconstructionists and critics who made of France the battlefield of ideas in the first half of the nineteenth century. He became the secretary of the Comte Henri de SaintSimon, who was then (in the early 1820's) ending an erratic but brilliant career as the progenitor of many of the ideas that dominated the nineteenth century. To Saint-Simon belongs thedistinction of having been the first to grasp the significance of the Industrial Revolution for the future social and political life of mankind. From Saint-Simon, Comte undoubtedly gathered many of the pattern ideas which later he developed to such a large degree of perfection. Having provided for his security by means of his connection with the Ecole Polytechnique, Comte gave up the rest of his life (1) to mathematics, in which he published an important work on geometry, (2) to tracing the evolution, filiation, and methodology of the sciences, (3) to the methodology and philosophy of a social physics, later known as sociology, and (4) to the development of a theory of social reform, in which the Religion of Humanity was to be the supreme technology. Although he died in 1857, at the age of 59, he succeeded in getting down and into print his most significant ideas. He has been variously characterized as an inspired genius, the greatest mind of the nineteenth century, and even of all time, as a charlatan, as mentally and morally unbalanced, and in many other ways. I shall try in the brief space at my disposal to give some idea of his achievements and leave to my readers the difficult task of characterization and evaluation. The period at which Comte lived was particularly propitious to be task of social and scientific reconstruction. The Industrial Revolution had already accomplished the disorganization of the old economic order and had stimulated a partial re-