In the beginning of his book, Course on the Positive Philosophy, Comte confronts the reader with a kind of riddle. He says that in order to develop a good theory, one has to observe the hard facts. Science has to be built on positive knowledge and contested knowledge about what actually is the case and every description of reality must always start from unbiased, straight forward observations. You could call this the creed of inductivism. One has to begin with observing a reality with an open eye, unprejudiced, oblivious of what one wants to see or hopes to see. That is how science begins. But now Compte comes up with a serious problem. He says, when you have no theoretically founded indication of what to watch out for, you cannot observe anything at all. Without any kind of guidance, just the slightest suggestion of what to pay attention to you are doomed to remain blind. You can only observe something if you have a theoretically founded expectation of what you might find. So this is his riddle. When observation without theory is impossible, and when a theory must always be founded on observations, how can we ever get out of this trap? How did the human mind escape from this paralyzing situation? Or, to quote from Comte, thus, between the necessity of observing facts in order to form a theory, and having a theory in order to observe facts, the human mind would be entangled in a vicious circle. How to solve that problem. And this is in fact why Comte has come up with this idea of the theological stage in human thinking. Mankind has of necessity to begin it's journal towards scientific knowledge. With an interpretation that is not founded on observation, but that is the outcome of a hunch, a conjecture, maybe a religious revelation. When we have developed such an unfounded theory about the world, then the members of later generations may begin to use that idea to better observe the world around them, to test that idea, and maybe to falsify it or to transform it into something that is not so easy to falsify. In fact, when I read Comte here, I see in him the precursor of that 20th century philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper. Who said that we always have to begin with both conjectures that we then try to refute. Science starts with somebody who has an unfounded maybe brilliant, spectacular, illuminating new idea. Something that he cannot prove at all and then comes the task of collecting the empirical data that may falsify the new insight, or not, or not yet. Comte has been described as an inductivist, somebody who believes that in science we first have to collect our data. An enormous mountain of well-observed fact and then, after that we can begin to develop our theory. Comte the man who gave us positivism is often seen as a rather naive inductive phase, an old-fashioned inductivist. Typical of period in which he lived. And I hope that I have made clear now that this is not quite true. Comte even in the very first pages of this book where he summarizes his own theoretical approach, has something more interesting to say. Something that cannot be labeled as inductivism or deductivism. What he stresses is that collecting facts without a theory to guide you Is impossible. And therefore, we need something to begin with. And that is why Comte believes that religious interpretations of the world have served a very important goal in the past. It is only out of those theological worldviews that mankind could develop modern scientific theories. Had the priests not broken this viscous circle. Scientific knowledge might never have come off the ground. The human species today, would have been as blind and helpless as it was 10,000 years ago. So in a strange way, Goethe admired religious thought, and this became much more evident in the latter part of his life and of his work.
