A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

France was that of Auguste Comte, which as set forth in the Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830-42) practically reaffirmed while it recast and supplemented the essentials of the anti-theological rationalism of the previous age, and in that sense rebuilt French positivism, giving that new name to the naturalistic principle. Though Comte's direct following was never large, it is significant that soon after the completion of his Cours we find Saisset lamenting that the war between the clergy and the philosophers, "suspended by the great political commotion of 1830," had been "revived with a new energy." [1976] The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-ecclesiastical system never succeeded beyond the formation of a politically powerless sect; and the attempt to prove its consistency with his philosophic system by claiming that from the first he had harboured a plan of social regulation [1977] is beside the case. A man's way of thinking may involve intellectual contradictions all through his life; and Comte's did. Positivism in the scientific sense cannot be committed to any one man's scheme for regulating society and conserving "cultus"; and Comte's was merely one of the many evoked in France by the memory of an age of revolutions. It belongs, indeed, to the unscientific and unphilosophic side of his mind, the craving for authority and the temper of ascendency, which connect with his admiration of the medieval Church. Himself philosophically an atheist, he condemned atheists because they mostly contemned his passion for regimentation. By reason of this idiosyncrasy and of the habitually dictatorial tone of his doctrine, he has made his converts latterly more from the religious than from the freethinking ranks. But both in France and in England his philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his leading English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed publicists of the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of a "science of society" where hitherto there had ruled the haziest forms of "providentialism." In France the general effect of the rationalistic movement had been such that when Taine, under the Third Empire, assailed the whole "classic" school in his Philosophes classiques (1857), his success was at once generally recognized, and a non-Comtist positivism was thenceforth the ruling philosophy. The same thing has happened in Italy, where quite a number of university professors are explicitly positivist in their philosophic teaching. [1978]