Comte, Auguste - Etienne Gilson (essay date 1937)
Etienne Gilson (essay date 1937)
SOURCE: "The Sociology of A. Comte," in The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937, pp. 248-70.
[In the following essay, Gilson considers Comte's sociologism to be "one of the most striking philosophical experiments recorded by history."]
On the third day of the month of Dante in the sixty-sixth year of the Great Western Crisis, the French philosopher Auguste Comte was completing the list of the one hundred fifty volumes that make up his "Positivist Library." In the Positivist Calendar, the third day of the month of Dante is the feast of Rabelais. Yet the "Positivist Library" was not a joke; it was a catalogue of the books which it is necessary and sufficient to read in order to acquire all the knowledge required by our social needs. Thirty volumes of poetry, thirty volumes of science, sixty volumes of history, and thirty volumes of what Comte called synthesis, make one...
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