Comte, Auguste - Mary Pickering (essay date 1993)
Mary Pickering (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Cours de philosophie positive: Positivism and the Natural Sciences," in Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume I, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 561-604.
[In the following essay, Pickering outlines Comte's positive philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.]
Let us not forget that in almost all minds, even the most elevated, ideas usually remain connected following the order of their first acquisition and that it is, consequently, a failing, which is most often irremediable, not to have begun by the beginning. Each century allows only a very small number of capable thinkers at the time of their maturity, like Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, to make a true tabula rasa in order to reconstruct from top to bottom the entire system of their acquired ideas.
Comte, 1830
AN INTRODUCTION TO...
[The entire page is 15982 words long]
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