Auguste Comte and Positivism

Mill's reckoning with the French thinker he first wrote to almost as a follower: praise for the early science, alarm at the later religion.

by John Stuart Mill191 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1865(aged 59)
Original language: English

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Overview

The first letter went from London to Paris in 1841, and in it Mill presented himself almost as a follower. Auguste Comte was then finishing the Cours de philosophie positive, which holds that every branch of knowledge passes through three stages, explaining events first by gods, then by abstract forces and at last by observed laws, and that the study of society was about to reach the third. Mill drew on it for the last part of his own System of Logic. The two men corresponded for about five years. When Comte lost his post as examiner for the École Polytechnique, friends of Mill in England collected money to keep him at work. Then the letters cooled. They disagreed about whether psychology is a science, about phrenology, and most of all about women, whom Comte held to be subordinate by nature. Mill was the first to write less often and Comte the first to stop. Comte died in 1857, and eight years later Mill settled the account in two long essays for the Westminster Review, reprinted the same year as Auguste Comte and Positivism. The first essay accepts most of the Cours and ranks its author among the major thinkers of the age, while objecting that Comte never says how a scientific claim is to be proved. The second turns to the Système de politique positive of the 1850s, in which Comte founded a Religion of Humanity with himself as its High Priest and a clergy of philosophers to direct what everyone else should believe. Mill grants that a religion without a god is possible. What he refuses is the organisation: a body of thinkers holding authority over opinion would end the free discussion on which their own science depends. The book argues that Comte's method was sound and his system a despotism, and that the second did not follow from the first. That division lasted. Émile Littré, the leading French follower of Comte, drew the same line, and for generations readers kept the early Comte and dismissed the late one. Scholars now dispute whether the two can be separated so cleanly.

Key concepts

What is the law of the three stages?

It is Comte's claim that thought on any subject passes through three phases. In the theological stage events are explained by the will of gods. In the metaphysical stage they are explained by abstract entities such as Nature or a vital force. In the positive stage people stop asking for hidden causes and look for the laws by which events follow one another. Mill accepts the law and notes that the study of society is the last to arrive there.

What does 'positive' mean in positive philosophy?

Positive philosophy holds that we know only phenomena, the things we can observe, and the regular ways in which they follow or accompany one another. What things are in themselves, and their ultimate causes, lie beyond knowledge. Mill stresses that Comte did not invent this view. It had guided working scientists since Bacon, Descartes and Galileo, and Comte's contribution was to state it completely and extend it to society.

What is the Religion of Humanity?

It is the religion Comte founded in his later years, which puts the human race, past, present and future, in the place of God. He calls this collective being the Grand Être, the Great Being, and directs prayer and private devotion towards it. Mill agrees that devotion to humanity can do for people what religion does. He rejects the ceremonies Comte prescribed and the priesthood he built around them.

What does Comte mean by altruism?

Altruism is Comte's word for living for others, and he makes it the whole of morality: the desires that concern oneself are to be starved until only the wish to serve remains. Mill agrees that concern for others should be cultivated far more than it is. He denies that it should be the only motive. Beyond what duty demands lies a region of conduct that earns praise when done and no blame when left undone.

What is the spiritual power in Comte's system?

The spiritual power is the body of philosophers that Comte wanted set over belief and education, separate from the government that commands actions. It would settle what is true in science and morals, and everyone else would accept its conclusions on trust. Mill agrees that most people must take much on authority. He holds that such authority has to be earned before a free public, and must never be organised into a corporation that discussion cannot reach.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

From gods to forces to laws

Does every branch of knowledge grow up the same way, from gods through abstract forces to observed laws? Mill accepts Comte's history of the sciences and asks what it leaves out.

Mill grants Comte the law of the three stages. People first explain events by wills like their own, then by abstract entities such as Nature or a vital force, and finally stop asking why and look for the laws by which things happen. He also accepts the ranking of the sciences from mathematics up to sociology, each resting on the one beneath it. His objections are to the gaps. Comte dismisses psychology, because he thinks the mind cannot observe itself. He writes off political economy as metaphysics. And he describes how science discovers without ever supplying a test of proof.

positivism
scientific method
philosophy of science
classification of sciences
sociology
intellectual history
philosophy of history
metaphysics
theology
causation
induction
polytheism
monotheism
epistemology
scientific inquiry
historical method
natural law

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A religion without God, and its priesthood

Can humanity itself be the object of a religion, and who would then decide what the faithful must believe? Mill grants Comte the first and refuses him the second.

In his later writings Comte founded a Religion of Humanity whose one rule is to live for others, with the human race, the Grand Être, as its object of worship. Mill allows that this is a real religion and a worthy feeling. What alarms him is the rest: two hours of prayer every day, a library of a hundred volumes and a bonfire for other books, and a clergy of philosophers whose judgments everyone is to accept as they accept those of astronomers. He traces the error to a passion for unity and a morality that leaves no space between duty and sin, and calls Comte a morality-intoxicated man.

religion
altruism
political authority
authority
intellectual freedom
philosophy of religion
education
family
ethics
human nature
political philosophy
social change
labor

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Within this work

passages held: 191
distinct concepts: 333
by passages held, corpus-wide: #366

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “philosophy of science” and “scientific method”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 18 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
philosophy of science	scientific method	8
causation	positivism	6
intellectual history	positivism	6
causation	metaphysics	4
causation	philosophy of science	3
education	political authority	3
education	scientific method	3
metaphysics	philosophy of science	3
positivism	scientific method	3
intellectual history	scientific method	2
metaphysics	positivism	2
philosophy of science	positivism	2
political authority	positivism	2
causation	scientific method	1
education	positivism	1
intellectual history	metaphysics	1
intellectual history	philosophy of science	1
metaphysics	scientific method	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1843 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
It was the first book of his own, and it made his name in 1843. Its claim that every belief must answer to experience is the ground on which the later books on morals and politics stand.
EN
1844 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy)
Written at twenty-three and twenty-four, these five essays waited until the System of Logic had found him readers. Their argument on trade returns, four years later, in the Principles of Political Economy.
EN
1848 Principles of Political Economy
Seven editions carried this treatise from 1848 to 1871, revised as his view of socialism moved. It is read here in the text of the seventh, the last Mill revised himself.
EN
1859 On Liberty
One of the two books Mill expected to outlast the rest, the other being the System of Logic. Its defence of individuality against majority opinion runs on into Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women.
EN
1861 Considerations on Representative Government
Written two years after On Liberty, it faces the same danger, a majority that overrides everyone else, and meets it with electoral machinery. It is his fullest statement on how a free people should be governed.
EN
1861 Utilitarianism
A defence of the ethics he inherited from Bentham and from his father, assembled from papers of the 1850s. Short as it is, it supplies the standard of right and wrong that his political books take for granted.
EN
1862 The Contest in America
Occasional journalism from Fraser's Magazine, written in haste before a journey to Greece. It shows Mill as a polemicist, arguing against the prevailing opinion of his own class.
EN
1865 Auguste Comte and Positivism you are here EN
1869 The Subjection of Women
The most contested of his books in its day, published in 1869 after his one term in Parliament. It carries the reasoning of On Liberty into marriage and the household.
EN
1879 Socialism
Left unfinished at his death, these are the posthumous "Chapters on Socialism", first drafts for a book planned in 1869. They return to a question that the Principles of Political Economy had reopened from one edition to the next.
EN

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