Brazil's flag carries a slogan borrowed from a French philosopher's science religion
Order and Progress, the motto on Brazil's flag, comes from Auguste Comte's positivism, which held that real knowledge must rest on experience and scientific law. Comte went on to design a secular religion of humanity, complete with a new calendar, and gave the world the word altruism.
Positivism holds that genuine knowledge is either true by definition or derived by reason from sensory experience; intuition, introspection and faith are dismissed or called meaningless. The English word arrived in the nineteenth century from French positivisme, from positif in the sense of imposed on the mind by experience. Early in that century rapid advances in natural science persuaded Comte, along with Laplace and Saint-Simon, that scientific method should replace metaphysics.
Comte, who lived from 1798 to 1857, set out the idea in his Course in Positive Philosophy, published between 1830 and 1842. He ranked the sciences by how exactly their phenomena can be determined, which he argued also tracks their complexity: astronomy first, then physics, chemistry and biology, with sociology, the queen science of society, last and hardest. He also proposed a law of three stages, in which humanity moves from theological explanation through a metaphysical age of abstract rights to a final positive, scientific stage. From science, he said, comes prediction, and from prediction, action.
His later religion of humanity, meant to supply the social glue of traditional worship, split his admirers. John Stuart Mill distinguished a good Comte, author of the Course, from a bad Comte, prophet of the secular church. English followers such as George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, who translated much of his work, rejected most of the system but liked his call to live for others, the phrase behind altruism. Brazilian thinkers embraced his idea of a scientific elite guiding industrial growth.
The method outlived the cult. Émile Durkheim discarded much of Comte's detail but kept the conviction that social science extends natural science to human behaviour, founding Europe's first sociology department at Bordeaux in 1895. Through the twentieth century positivism lost ground in the social sciences, criticised for scientism, reductionism and sweeping generalisation.
Source: Positivism
