Volume 1 of 2. These volumes are not a close translation of Auguste Comte's original work. It is a very free translation. It is more a condensation than an abridgment. The object was to convey the meaning of the original in the cleverest way possible; and to this all other considerations were made to yield. Whichever way we look over the whole field of science, we see the truths and ideas presented by Comte cropping out from the surface, and recognized as the foundation of all that is systematic in our knowledge.
French philosopher Isidore Auguste Comte, known as the founder of positivism, also established sociology as a systematic study.
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte bettered the discipline and the doctrine. People sometimes regard him first of science in the modern sense of the term.
The utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon strongly influenced Comte, who developed an attempt to remedy the malaise of the revolution and called for a new doctrine, based on the sciences. Comte influenced major 19th-century thought and the work of Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His now outdated concept of evolutionism set the tone for early theorists and anthropologists, such as [authore:Harriet Martineau] and Herbert Spencer; Émile Durkheim presented modern academics as practical and objective research.
Theories of Comte culminated in the "Religion of Humanity," which influenced the development of secular organizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word altruism.