ABSTRACT
Auguste Comte was actually born in the eighteenth century, and there is a touch of the eighteenth century in his thinking. By the time of his death in 1857 his influence was immense upon all progressive European thought. Nowadays he is awarded a very small place in most histories of philosophy, and the Church or organized body of teachers which he founded, once so brilliant and influential, may almost be described as moribund. Such neglect seems a sign of complete failure; but in reality it is due almost as much to the general acceptance of his main doctrines as to their rejection. No doubt he was overbold. He attempted to build a complete and final system of philosophy based upon all the sciences. Necessarily any such system was conditioned by the state of science at the time, by the social environment of post-Revolutionary France in which he lived, by the traditions of Catholicism by which he was surrounded. As the conditions have changed the system has ceased to fit. Also, the era of hope and confidence into which he was born, and which made the creation of his system possible, was succeeded by an age of mistrust in which scientists were shy of all wide principles and generalizations, and took refuge in their separate specialisms. The specialists had been his chief enemies in his lifetime and they triumphed over him after his death. Again, the two opposing armies of Faith and Science, whom he sought to reconcile, and who seemed in many ways to be approaching one another in the nineteenth century, seem now to have lost any particular desire to be reconciled. The Catholic Church holds as firmly as ever that it possesses the monopoly of truth, subject to no progressive reinterpretation. 'That meaning of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother, the Church, has once declared.' 2 And the post-war sceptic on his side has no particular desire to reinterpret dogmas which have ceased to interest him.
