COMTE’S LAW OF THREE STAGES
In, as early as 1822, when Auguste Comte was still working as Saint-Simon’s secretary, he attempted to discover the successive stages through which human race had evolved. In his study, he began from the state of human race, not much superior to the great apes, to the state in which he found the civilized society of Europe. In this study, he applied scientific methods of comparison and arrived at ‘The Law of Human Progress’ or ‘The Law of Three Stages.’ The three stages are:
The Theological or fictitious stage: According to Comte, in this stage, “all theoretical conceptions, whether general or special bear a supernatural impress”. Unable to discover the natural causes of the various happenings, the primitive men attributed them to imaginary or divine forces. This stage is also divided into four sub-stages as (a) Fetishism (b) Anthropomorphism (c) Polytheism (d) Monotheism.
Fetishism: During this sub-stage, the man accepts the existence of the spirit or the soul. It did not admit priesthood.
Anthropomorphism: In the second sub-stage, with the gradual development in human thinking, there occurred a change or improvement in human thinking, which resulted in the development of this stage.
Polytheism: During this sub-stage, man begins to believe in magic and allied activities. He then transplants or imposes a special god on every object. Thus, they believed in several gods and created a class of priests to get the goodwill and blessings of these gods.
Monotheism: During this sub-stage of the theological stage, man believes that there is only one centre of power which guides and controls all the activities of the world. Thus, a man believed in the superhuman power of only one god.
The Metaphysical or abstract stage: This stage being an improvement upon the earlier stage, it was believed that the abstract power or force guides and determines the events in the world. Metaphysical thinking discards belief in a concrete god.
The Scientific or positive stage: The dawn of the nineteenth century marked the beginning of the positive stage in which “observation predominates over imagination” and all theoretical concepts have become positive. In this final stage, dominated by industrial administrators and scientists, the nature of the human mind has given up its childish and vain search for Absolute notions, origins and destinations of the universe and its causes but seeks to establish scientific principles governing phenomena.
Auguste Comte maintained that each stage of the development of human thoughts necessarily grew out of the preceding one. Only when the previous stage exhausts itself does the new stage develop. He also correlated the three stages of human thought with the development of social organization, types of social order, the types of social units and material conditions found in society. He believed that social life evolved in the same way as the successive changes in human thought took place.
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