COMTE, Auguste.

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System of Positive Polity. First edition in English of Système de politique positive, originally published in Paris between 1851 and 1854. Comte's mature and perhaps most ambitious work proposes the wholesale reorganisation of society through a political, moral, and religious programme grounded in positivist sociology and centred on the Religion of Humanity."The task of the System of Positive Polity, its preface promises, would be to place all aspects of human nature - that is, feelings, intellect, and action - in their proper relationships. Comte's shift in method was simply his acknowledgement that, after all, mankind needs some guiding principle in the collection and organization of knowledge. Comte believed that the only reasonable reference point had to be the welfare of mankind: only knowledge which is useful to man has true value. Subjective though such a value judgement might be, it provided Comte with the essential footing for his unitary system. While we might have expected, from the early emphasis on intellect, that what Comte aimed at was a religion of science, the end result of his work was, in fact, the development of the Religion of Humanity - a religion based on feelings" (Standley, p. 95)."Despite the excessive moral preachings of this work, its vision of science as the tool for reconstructing society was to be an important element in sociology's mission as seen by later generations of French sociologists" (Turner, p. 20).The set is from the collection of Geo

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