AUGUST COMTE
The Catechism of Positive
Religion
or Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion in Thirteen
Systematic Conversations Between a Woman and a Priest of Humanity
Translated by Richard Congreve. Third ed., revised and corrected [1891]. Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley
Publishers, 1973 [First English Translation 1858]. 3rd ed. 1891 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner,
and Company Limited, 1891).
[33] The Woman.—I have often asked
myself, my dear father, why you persist in designating as a religion your
universal doctrine, though it rejects all supernatural beliefÉ. I ask you to
[34] begin your exposition by explaining, in direct and precise language, the
radical sense of the word Religion.
The
Priest.—This name, my dear daughter, has, in fact, by its etymology no necessary
connection with any of the opinions
that may be used for attaining the end to which it points. In itself, it expresses the state of
perfect unity, which is distinctive of our existence, both individual and social,
when all its parts, moral as well as physical, habitually converge towards a
common purpose. Thus the term
would be equivalent to the word synthesis, were it not that this last, not by force
of its composition, but by nearly universal custom, is now limited entirely to
the domain of the intellect, whilst the other embraces all the attributes of
man. Religion, then, consists
in regulating each individual nature, and in rallying all the separate
individuals; which are but two distinct cases of one problem. For every man, in the
successive periods of his life, differs from himself not less than at any one
time he differs from others; so that the laws of permanence and participation
are identical.
Such
harmony, for the individual or society, not being ever fully attainable, so
complicated is our existence, this definition of religion delineates, then the
unchanging type to which tends more and more the totality of human effort. Our happiness and our merit consist,
above all, in drawing as near as possible to this unity the gradual development
of which is the best measure of real progress towards individual or social
perfectionÉ.
The
value always set on this synthetical state naturally concentrated attention on
the method of attaining it. Thus
men were led, taking the means for the end, to transfer the name of religion to whatever system of [35]
opinions it represented. But
however irreconcilable these numerous beliefs at first sight appear, Positivism
brings them into essential agreement, by referring each to the purpose it
answered in its own time and country.
There is, at bottom, but one religion, at once universal and final, to
which all the partial and provisional syntheses more and more pointed, so far
as their respective conditions allowed.
[37]
The Woman.—Éwhat are its [religionÕs] general conditions.
The
Priest.—A right judgment on this pointÉ follows from a searching examination of
the word religionÉ. To constitute a complete
and durable harmony, what is really wanted is to bind together the within by love and
to bind it again to the without by faith.
Such, generally stated, is the necessary participation of the heart and
the intellect as regards the synthetical state, individual or collective.