The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

followed by three volumes dealing, respectively, with human nature, education, and man’s work in the world. This is how the treatise on mathematics begins:

‘The subordination of Progress to Order, of Analysis to Synthesis, of Self-love to Love of others; these are the three modes, practical, theoretical and ethical, of describing the problem of man’s life; the attainment of complete and lasting unity. These various ways of stating what is in truth one question correspond to the three sides of our nature, activity, intelligence, and feeling: but so inter-dependent are these, that the three aspects of the problem are not merely connected, they are identical. Nevertheless the last of these takes precedence of the two others, since it alone touches the direct source in which the solution is to be found. For Order implies Love; Synthesis is impossible except as the result of Sympathy. Consequently unity in speculation and unity in action are impossible without unity in feeling. Therefore Religion is more important than Philosophy or Polity. And thus in the last resort it may be said that the problem of life is to bring about harmony in our feelings by enlarging social love and repressing self-love. To do this implies the subordination of change to permanence, and of the spirit of detail to large conceptions of the whole.’

So here we have, I suggest, the answer to those who would pay lip-service to Comte but set aside his Great Being and his Religion of Humanity as impossible eccentricities. A truer interpretation might be to maintain that Comte’s religion is his sociology. Academic sociology has rejected this, and so the word itself has degenerated until it can legitimately be said by one of the most serious and sensitive of our Christian educationists today, that ‘there is no need for sociology or psychology or any of the sciences to believe in man’. This makes the dilemma plain. Comte has proclaimed the science of society: ‘science’ must mean, in the generally accepted terminology of our day, measurement without valuation. And so Sociology has been defeated because the meaning of ‘science’ has shrunk. The word originally meant ‘knowledge’, so that a true science of man would mean knowledge of

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