L3: Auguste Comte Law of Three Stages

The Law of Three stages gives an evolutionary perspective of Auguste Comte.
Auguste Comte claimed the history of society could be divided into three different stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive, otherwise known as the Law of Three Stages. This development has followed a definite pattern and a fundamental law.
- Comte argued that the human mind, individual human beings, all knowledge, and world history develop through three successive stages: the theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical or abstract; and the scientific or positive. These three methods of philosophizing, that is making reality comprehensible are incompatible.
- The necessary starting point of the development of human understanding is the theological stage. The theological stage is dominated by a search for the essential nature of things, and people come to believe that all phenomena are created and influenced by gods and supernatural forces. The highest point of development of the theological stage is reached when all phenomena are conceived as the effect of a single deity i.e. monotheism. This period started with the beginning of human history and was dominated by priests and the military and the dominant social unit was the family.
- In the metaphysical stage the supernatural beings are replaced by abstract forces and underlying entities to which all phenomena are referred. The highest form of development of this stage was when all phenomena were referred to one single entity: Nature. In this time in which abstract speculative thinking is most prominent
- It is a speculative doctrine on the ‘essences’ and ‘causes’ of phenomena. The middle ages were predominantly metaphysical; the basic social unit was the state and was dominated by churchmen and lawyers.
- The metaphysical stage started about 1300 A.D. and was short lived roughly till 1800. It corresponds very roughly to the middle Ages and Renaissance.
- ‘Meta’ means beyond and physical means material world. Supernatural being is replaced by supernatural force. An example of thinking in the metaphysical stage is people who believed that the planets were physical objects in space but that they influenced people's lives via astrology. The idea here is that societies in the metaphysical stage still believe in some supernatural or magical aspects of life, but they are also rooted in the concrete parts of life.
- the second is but a transitory stage that makes possible the passage from the first to the last. The second stage is only a simple modification of the first: the questions remain the same, but in the answers supernatural agents are replaced by abstract entities.
- At the third stage, the positive stage, the human mind recognizes the impossibility of acquiring absolute knowledge concerning the origin and purpose of the universe, and applies itself to the study of the laws of the invariable relations of succession and resemblance of phenomena. This last stage was distinguished by an awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Knowledge could only be relative to man’s nature as a species and to his varying social and historical situations. Absolute explanations were therefore better abandoned for the more sensible discovery of laws based on the observable relations between phenomena. This science takes reasoning and observation as the means of knowledge. What is now meant by an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection. This is the modern industrial society and the social unit is the whole of humanity and should be guided by industrial administrators and scientists.
The law is that each branch of knowledge progresses successively through three different theoretical conditions:
Comte's famed "law of the three stages" is an example of his search for invariant laws governing the social world. The metaphysical stage is a transitional stage in which mysterious, abstract forces (e.g., nature) replace supernatural forces as the powers that explain the workings of the world. The positivist stage is the last and highest stage in Comte's work. In this stage, people search for invariant laws that govern all of the phenomena of the world.
Comte’s ideas relating to the law of three stages reveal that man is becoming more and more rational and scientific in his approach by gradually giving up speculations, imagination etc. The law of three stages is the three stages of mental and social development.
Comte considered his law of Three stages based upon belief in social evolution to be the most important. There has been an evolution in the human thinking, so that each succeeding stage is superior to and more evolved than the preceding stage.
In the positive stage human beings cease to look for ‘original sources’ or final causes because these can be neither checked against facts nor utilised to serve our needs.