Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte was Saint-Simon’s secretary, broke with him, and spent his life in Paris, in poverty and recurrent madness, building the philosophy he called positivism: that human thought passes through theological and metaphysical stages to the positive, or scientific, and that a science of society, which he named sociology, would complete the sequence. The Positive Philosophy, in six volumes, is that system; the later Positive Polity turned it into a religion of humanity with its own calendar and priesthood. Mill admired the first and recoiled from the second. He is the founder sociologists acknowledge and do not read.