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 Positive Philosophy

Comte dedicated the Cours to Joseph Fourier and Blainville, both of whom had been a source of personal...