ABSTRACT
"Positivism" is the term Auguste Comte preferred to embrace the scientific spirit and method in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Positivism as a movement of thought caught on quickly and as a tradition has a complex history in which the term itself came eventually to mean quite different things from its founder's intentions. Espousing the scientific revolutions of the previous two centuries, Comte attempted to show that the sciences develop in a certain order, and they eventually tend to form a system in which each science has a place and mutually influences the others. The concept of evil would thus be replaced with scientific terms dealing with disease and pathology. The primitive idea of evil, associated with fetishism, thus made its return, but under the hegemony of the scientific regime which would limit its sphere of applicability and action. Scientists have not been universally attracted to atheism, scientific politics, or fetishism.
