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The social philosophy and religion of Comte
The social philosophy and religion of Comte Author:Edward Caird Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE POSITIVE OR CONSTRUCTIVE SIDE OF COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY HIS SUBSTITUTES FOR METAPHYSIC AND THEOLOGY. His recognition of the need of subs... more »titutes for Theology and Meta- phymc—His assertion that his philosophy is relative and subjective—Double meaning of the relativity of knowledge as involving the assertion or the denial of real or absolute knowledge— Collision of Comte's earlier and later views on this point— Comte''s subjective synthesis not subjective in the sense of Individualism, nor yet in the sense that a conscious subject is implied in all objects—His compromise between these opposite theories—His doctrine that man sees the world in ordine ad hominem but not in ordine ad universum—Impossibility of separating nature from man or of criticising tlie whole system to which man belongs—Defects of Comte's religion according to his own idea of religion—Schisms in the school of Comte. In the preceding chapter I have tried to explain how Comte was led to treat Metaphysics and Theology as merely transitional forms of human thought, and to show that this view not only involves a false conception of their nature, but alsoHis View of Development. 113 necessitates an entire -misrepresentation of the course of their historical development. To regard the history of Metaphysics and Theology as a purely negative process, by which the first concrete fulness of religious conceptions was gradually attenuated till nothing remained but the bare abstract idea of Nature, and, on the other hand, to think of the history of science as the corresponding positive process, by which the mind of man advanced from the general to the special, from the investigation of the simplest numerical and spatial relations of things to the knowledge of the complex social nature of man—this ...« less