Auguste Comte
French philosopher (1798–1857), educated at the École Polytechnique in Paris until his expulsion for taking part in a student revolt, and for some years personal secretary to the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, from whom he absorbed the idea that society needed scientific reorganisation after the revolutionary upheavals, although the relationship eventually broke down amid mutual accusations of intellectual plagiarism. Regarded as the founder of positivism and the creator of the very term 'sociology' (which he initially called 'social physics'), Comte set out his central doctrine in the extensive Course of Positive Philosophy (six volumes, 1830–1842): his law of the three stages, according to which both individual thought and human societies necessarily pass through three successive phases of intellectual development — the theological stage, in which phenomena are explained by supernatural wills; the metaphysical stage, in which they are explained by abstract entities; and the positive stage, in which they are explained exclusively by laws observable through the scientific method — this last stage being the rational culmination toward which human knowledge ineluctably tends. Comte also established a hierarchy of the sciences according to their increasing degree of complexity and their order of historical maturation — mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and, finally, sociology, the most complex science and the last to reach the positive stage — placing sociology at the summit of the entire edifice of scientific knowledge. In his final phase, marked by a profound personal crisis following the death of his lover Clotilde de Vaux, Comte drifted toward formulating a 'Religion of Humanity', with rites, secular saints and an organised cult intended to replace Christianity, a project that alienated many of his former disciples but reflects his conviction that positive science, to govern society effectively, needed a moral and affective component as potent as that of traditional religions.