Auguste Comte Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

Auguste Comte
Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

Auguste Comte
If biological phenomena are incomparably more complex than those of any preceding science, the study of them admits of the most extensive assemblage of intellectual means (many of them new) and develops human faculties hitherto inactive, or known only in a rudimentary state.

Auguste Comte
On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are... necessarily denied to us.. We shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition.

Auguste Comte
Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

Auguste Comte
Mathematics will always necessarily be the last link in the chain of the sciences...

Auguste Comte
If science springs from art, it can only be matured when it has left art behind.

Auguste Comte
The education of physicists must be more complicated than that of astronomers.

Auguste Comte
The business of concrete mathematics is to discover the equations which express the mathematical laws of the phenomenon under consideration; and these equations are the starting point of the calculus, which must obtain from them certain quantities by means of others.

Auguste Comte
No science can be really understood apart from its special history, which again cannot be separated from the general history of Humanity.

Auguste Comte
The study of the external world and of Man is the eternal business of philosophy.

Auguste Comte
Our power of speculation, limited as it is, still far surpasses our capacity for action...

Auguste Comte
We can now define Mathematical science with precision. It has for its object the indirect measurement of magnitudes, and it proposes to determine magnitudes by each other, according to the precise relations which exist between them.

Auguste Comte
Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.

Auguste Comte
Experiment cannot but be less and less decisive, in proportion to the complexity of the phenomena to be explored.

Auguste Comte
The aim of every science is foresight (prevoyance). For the laws of established observation of phenomena are generally employed to foresee their succession. All men, however little advanced make true predictions, which are always based on the same principle, the knowledge of the future from the past.

Auguste Comte
Life is a struggle between dead nature and living nature.

Auguste Comte
There is no inquiry which is not finally reducible to a question of Numbers; for there is none which may not be conceived of as consisting in the determination of quantities by each other, according to certain relations.

Auguste Comte
The time however has arrived when biology must, like the other sciences, make a fresh start in a purely speculative direction, free from all entanglement with medical or any other art.

Auguste Comte
The domain of physics is no proper field for mathematical pastimes. The best security would be in giving a geometrical training to physicists, who need not then have recourse to mathematicians, whose tendency is to despise experimental science.

Auguste Comte
Language forms a kind of wealth, which all can make use of at once without causing any diminution of the store, and which thus admits a complete community of enjoyment; for all, freely participating in the general treasure, unconsciously aid in its preservation.

Auguste Comte
Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

Auguste Comte
After Montesquieu, the next great addition to Sociology (which is the term I may be allowed to invent to designate Social Physics) was made by Condorcet, proceeding on the views suggested by his illustrious friend Turgot.

Auguste Comte
The mathematical thermology created by Fourier may tempt us to hope that, as he has estimated the temperature of the space in which we move, me may in time ascertain the mean temperature of the heavenly bodies: but I regard this order of facts as for ever excluded from our recognition. We can never learn their internal constitution, nor, in regard to some of them, how heat is absorbed by their atmosphere. We may therefore define Astronomy as the science by which we discover the laws of the geometrical and mechanical phenomena presented by the heavenly bodies.

Auguste Comte
Nothing at bottom is real except humanity.

Auguste Comte
Social positivism only accepts duties, for all and towards all. Its constant social viewpoint cannot include any notion of rights, for such notion always rests on individuality. We are born under a load of obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. These obligations then increase or accumulate, for it is some time before we can return any service. … Any human right is therefore as absurd as immoral. Since there are no divine rights anymore, this concept must therefore disappear completely as related only to the preliminary regime and totally inconsistent with the final state where there are only duties based on functions.

Auguste Comte
Love our principle, order our foundation, progress our goal.

Auguste Comte
Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena.... but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation....

Auguste Comte
M. Comte used to reproach his early English admirers with maintaining the 'conspiracy of silence' concerning his later performances.

Auguste Comte
Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.

Auguste Comte