coloured (fig.): imbued with a particular tone or character, conditioned, influenced. ~ (Oxford Dictionary).

come about [= come round]: (of a boat) change direction; (of the wind) change to a more favourable quarter; hence, change for the better, esp. after faintness, bad temper, etc.; be converted to another person’s opinion’. ~ (Oxford Dictionary).

commentitious (adj.): invented; feigned; imaginary; fictitious. [from Latin commenticius, ‘devised’, ‘fabricated’, ‘feigned’, from commentiri, ‘devise a falsehood’]. ~ (Century Dictionary and Cyclopaedia).

commonsense: ordinary or normal understanding, as possessed by all except the insane and the mentally handicapped’. (Oxford Dictionary).

⁽*⁾compendium (n.; pl. compendiums or compendia): 1. a short but complete summary of something; 2. a list or collection of various items. [Latin, ‘a shortening’, from compendere, ‘to weigh together’; from com- + pendere, ‘to weigh’]. ~ (American Heritage Dictionary).

Complement:

Complementary:

• [Wikipedia]: Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte (1798-1857), a French philosopher and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism, is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. Auguste Comte’s ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology; indeed, he invented the term and treated that discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences. Influenced by the utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte developed positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social disorder caused by the French Revolution, which he believed indicated imminent transition to a new form of society. He sought to establish a new social doctrine based on science, which he labelled ‘Positivism’. He had a major impact on nineteenth-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and George Eliot. His concept of sociology and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthrop

Auguste Comte’s social theories culminated in his “Religion of Humanity”, which presaged the development of non-theistic religious humanist and secular humanist organisations in the nineteenth century. He may also have coined the word altruism. (...elided...). Auguste Comte married Caroline Massin in 1825. In 1826, he was taken to a mental health hospital, but left without being cured—only stabilised by French alienist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol—so that he could work again on his plan (he would later attempt suicide in 1827 by jumping off the Pont des Arts). In the time between this and their divorce in 1842, he published the six volumes of his “Cours de Philosophie Positive” (“Positive Philosophy Course”).

Comte developed a close friendship with John Stuart Mill. From 1844, he fell deeply in love with the Catholic Clotilde de Vaux, although because she was not divorced from her first husband, their love was never consummated. After her death in 1846 this love became quasi-religious, and Comte, working closely with Mill (who was refining his own such system) developed a new “Religion of Humanity”.

He published four volumes of Système de politique positive (“Positive Policy System”), 1851-1854. His final work, the first volume of La Synthèse Subjective (“The Subjective Synthesis”), was published in 1856. Comte died in Paris on 5 September 1857 from stomach cancer and was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, surrounded by cenotaphs in memory of his mother, Rosalie Boyer, and of Clotilde de Vaux. His apartment from 1841 to 1857 is now conserved as the Maison d’Auguste Comte and is located at 10 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, in Paris’ 6th arrondissement.

Work: Auguste Comte’s Positivism.

(Main articles: Positivism).

Auguste Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in “The Course in Positive Philosophy”, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the 1848 work, “A General View of Positivism” (published in English in 1865). The first three volumes of “The Course in Positive Philosophy” dealt chiefly with the physical sciences already in existence (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two volumes emphasised the inevitable coming of social science. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying the sciences in this way, Auguste Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. He was also the first to distinguish natural philosophy from science explicitly. For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex “Queen science” of human society itself. His work “View of Positivism” would therefore set out to define, in more detail, the empirical goals of sociological method.

Auguste Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general “Law of Three Stages”. His stages were:

(1) the Theological Stage;

(2) the Metaphysical Stage, and;

(3) the Positive Stage.

The Theological Stage was seen from the perspective of nineteenth century France as preceding the Age of Enlightenment, in which man’s place in society and society’s restrictions upon man were referenced to God. Man blindly believed in whatever he was taught by his ancestors. He believed in a supernatural power. Fetishism played a significant role during this time.

By the Metaphysical Stage, Comte referred not to the Metaphysics of Aristotle or other ancient Greek philosophers. Rather, the idea was rooted in the problems of French society subsequent to the French Revolution of 1789. The Metaphysical Stage involved the justification of universal rights as being on a vauntingly {i.e., pretentiously, ostentatiously; boastfully} higher plane than the authority of any human ruler to countermand, although said rights were not referenced to the sacred beyond mere metaphor. This stage is known as the stage of investigation, because people started reasoning and questioning, although no solid evidence was laid. The stage of investigation was the beginning of a world which questioned authority and religion.

In the Scientific Stage, which came into being after the failure of the revolution and of Napoleon, people could find solutions to social problems and bring them into force despite the proclamations of human rights or prophecy of the will of God. Science started to answer questions in full stretch. In this regard he was similar to Karl Marx and Jeremy Bentham. For its time, this idea of a Scientific Stage was considered up-to-date, although from a later standpoint, it is too derivative of classical physics and academic history. Auguste Comte’s Law of Three Stages was one of the first theories of social evolutionism.

The other universal law he called the “Encyclopaedic Law”. By combining these laws, Comte developed a systematic and hierarchical classification of all sciences, including inorganic physics (astronomy, earth science and chemistry) and organic physics (biology and, for the first time, ‘physique sociale’, later renamed sociology). Independently from Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s introduction of the term in 1780, Comte re-invented “sociology”, and introduced the term as a neologism, in 1838. Comte had earlier used the term “social physics”, but that term had been appropriated by others, notably by Adolphe Quetelet.

• “The most important thing to determine was the natural order in which the sciences stand—not how they can be made to stand, but how they must stand, irrespective of the wishes of any one. ... This Comte accomplished by taking as the criterion of the position of each the degree of what he called “positivity”, which is simply the degree to which the phenomena can be exactly determined. This, as may be readily seen, is also a measure of their relative complexity, since the exactness of a science is in inverse proportion to its complexity. The degree of exactness or positivity is, moreover, that to which it can be subjected to mathematical demonstration, and therefore mathematics, which is not itself a concrete science, is the general gauge by which the position of every science is to be determined. Generalising thus, Comte found that there were five great groups of phenomena of equal classificatory value but of successively decreasing positivity. To these he gave the names: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology”. (Lester F. Ward, “The Outlines of Sociology”; 1898).

This idea of a special science (not the humanities, not metaphysics) for the social was prominent in the nineteenth century and not unique to Auguste Comte. It has recently been discovered that the term “sociology” (as a term considered coined by him) had already been introduced in 1780, albeit with a different meaning, by the French essayist Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748-1836). The ambitious (or many would say ‘grandiose’) way that Auguste Comte conceived of this special science of the social, however, was unique. He saw this new science, sociology, as the last and greatest of all sciences, one which would include all other sciences and integrate and relate their findings into a cohesive whole. It has to be pointed out, however, that he noted a seventh science, one even greater than sociology. Namely, he considered “Anthropology, or true science of Man [to be] the last gradation in the Grand Hierarchy of Abstract Science”.

The motto Ordem e Progresso (“Order and Progress”) in the flag of Brazil is inspired by Auguste Comte’s motto of positivism: L’amour pour principe et l’ordre pour base; le progrès pour but (“Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal”). Several of those involved in the military coup d’état that deposed the Empire of Brazil and proclaimed Brazil to be a republic were followers of the ideas of Comte.

Auguste Comte’s explanation of the Positive Philosophy introduced the important relationship between theory, practice and human understanding of the world. On page 27 of the 1855 printing of Harriet Martineau’s translation of The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, is his observation that, “If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theories. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them”.

Auguste Comte’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of social elements was a forerunner of modern functionalism. Nevertheless, as with many others of Comte’s time, certain elements of his work are now viewed as eccentric and unscientific, and his grand vision of sociology as the centrepiece of all the sciences has not come to fruition.

His emphasis on a quantitative, mathematical basis for decision-making remains with us today. It is a foundation of the modern notion of Positivism, modern quantitative statistical analysis, and business decision-making. His description of the continuing cyclical relationship between theory and practice is seen in modern business systems of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) where advocates describe a continuous cycle of theory and practice through the four-part cycle of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA, the Shewhart cycle). Despite his advocacy of quantitative analysis, Comte saw a limit in its ability to help explain social phenomena.

The early sociology of Herbert Spencer came about broadly as a reaction to Comte; writing after various developments in evolutionary biology, Spencer attempted to reformulate the discipline in what we might now describe as socially Darwinistic terms. Auguste Comte’s fame today owes in part to Émile Littré, who founded The Positivist Review in 1867. Debates continue to rage, however, as to how much Comte appropriated from the work of his mentor, Henri de Saint-Simon.

Auguste Comte did not create the idea of Sociology, the study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture, but instead he expanded it greatly. Positivism, the principle of conducting sociology through empiricism and the scientific method, was the primary way that Comte studied sociology. He split sociology into two different areas of study. One, social statics, how society holds itself together, and two, social dynamics, the study of the causes of societal changes. He saw these areas as parts of the same system. Comte compared society and sociology to the human body and anatomy. “Comte ascribed the functions of connection and boundaries to the social structures of language, religion, and division of labour”. Through language, everybody in a society, both past and present, can communicate with each other. Religion unites society under a common belief system and function in harmony under a system. Finally, the division of labour allows everyone in the society dependent upon each other. ~ (2012 Wikipedia Encyclopaedia).

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