SOURCE: "The Future," in Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences: Being an Exposition of the Principles of the Cours de philosophie positive of Auguste Comte, 1853. Reprint by George Bell and Sons, 1878, pp. 327-38.

In the following essay, Lewes considers Comte's Law of Three States and his class system.

Guided by his logical principles of the general extension of the Positive Method to the rational study of social phenomena, Comte has gradually applied to the whole of the past his fundamental law of the evolution at once mental and social, consisting in the passage of humanity through three successive states: the preparatory Theological state, the transitory Metaphysical state, and the final Positive state. By the aid of this single law he has explained all the great historical phases, considered as the principal consecutive phases of development, so as rightly to appreciate the true character proper to each of them, with...