Cours de philosophie positive

Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive, issued in six volumes by the publisher Bachelier between 1830 and 1842, is Comte's own foundational statement of positivist philosophy, including his influential three-stage theory of human intellectual development from theological through metaphysical to positive or scientific thought. As Comte's own primary text, it is the direct and authoritative source for what he actually argued and how. Its limit is that it is a nineteenth century philosophical system in its own right, whose specific historical and sociological claims have been extensively revised or rejected by later scholarship, so its schema is best cited as a historically important framework rather than as an empirically settled account of how religious thought actually develops.