The order of mankind as seen by Auguste Comte

Anthropo-philosophy. The term Anthropo-biology has already appeared in another Foundation Lecture—that given on aspects of the work of Jaworski. Can we begin to see the possibility of Anthropo-sociology in what Sir Patrick Geddes called ‘the magnificent pro-synthetic sketch of Comte’s sociology’?

Now it is, or should be, known that the word ‘sociology’ was invented by August Comte—in 1839, to be precise—for what he had first called ‘social physics’. As a hybrid of Greek and Latin, this word symbolized the role of European culture in the leadership which he believed was the responsibility of the West to the world.

The basic elements from which society is formed had been studied in ancient India; and the modern Indian sage Bhagavan Das, to whom last year’s Foundation Lecture was devoted, developed this study in a way that makes it applicable to modern life, in “The Science of Social Organisation’. The particular role of Comte was to carry further than anyone else before him the theory of the application of science to society. But he has a further and possibly even more important claim on our attention, because in a manner transcending his own rationalistic theory he advanced and upheld a vision of Humanity—past, present and future—as constituting a living organism—‘Le Grand Etre’, the Great Being which alone gives meaning to our individual existences.

Comte, though the founder of the Religion of Humanity, is a very French figure—as one might say that William Morris, for instance, is a very English figure. His cast of thought, and to a considerable extent his sources, are French. We have to think of his as the prodigy of a young scholar, waiting at Montpelier because he had passed first into the Ecole Polytechnique—one of the greatest European institutions of higher education—before he was sixteen; looking out on the France that was trying to find itself after the cataclysm of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire and its fall, a cataclysm that had reached its climax just about the time when he was born. It had been a time of sweeping away, of tearing down, of trying to express in action some of the results of

critical thinking which had characterized the preceding period, the

2