[2] Comte's ideas were also fundamental to the development of sociology, with him inventing the very term and treating the discipline as the crowning achievement of the sciences.

[3][4] Influenced by Henri de Saint-Simon,[1] Comte's work attempted to remedy the social disorder caused by the French Revolution, which he believed indicated an imminent transition to a new form of society.

[7] Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier,[1] Hérault on 19 January 1798, at the time under the rule of the newly founded French First Republic.

Following his return to Montpellier, Comte soon came to see unbridgeable differences with his Catholic and monarchist family and set off again for Paris, earning money by small jobs.

Later that year he became a student and secretary to Henri de Saint-Simon, who brought Comte into contact with intellectual society and greatly influenced his thought therefrom.

During that time, Comte published his first essays in the various publications headed by Saint-Simon, L'Industrie, Le Politique, and L'Organisateur (Charles Dunoyer and Charles Comte's Le Censeur Européen), although he would not publish under his own name until 1819's "La séparation générale entre les opinions et les désirs" ("The general separation of opinions and desires").

In 1826, he was taken to a mental health hospital, but left without being cured – only stabilized by French alienist Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol – so that he could work again on his plan (he would later attempt suicide in 1827 by jumping off the Pont des Arts).

After her death in 1846, this love became quasi-religious, and Comte, working closely with Mill (who was refining his own such system) developed a new "Religion of Humanity".

Comte died in Paris on 5 September 1857 from stomach cancer and was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery, surrounded by cenotaphs in memory of his mother, Rosalie Boyer, and of Clotilde de Vaux.

[citation needed] Comte offered an account of social evolution, proposing that society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to a general law of three stages.

To these, he gave the names: astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology.This idea of a special science (not the humanities, not metaphysics) for the social was prominent in the 19th century and not unique to Comte.

"[15] Comte's explanation of the Positive philosophy introduced the important relationship between theory, practice, and human understanding of the world.

Nevertheless, as with many others of Comte's time, certain elements of his work are now viewed as eccentric and unscientific, and his grand vision of sociology as the centerpiece of all the sciences has not come to fruition.

Some intellectuals allude to the fact that the utopian system of modern life "served as a catalyst for various world-making activities during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (Willson, M. 2019) [further explanation needed].

In later years, Comte developed the Religion of Humanity for positivist societies to fulfil the cohesive function once held by traditional worship.

[12] The system was unsuccessful but met with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) to influence the proliferation of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially through the work of secularists such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve.

Although Comte's English followers, including George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, for the most part rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea of a religion of humanity and his injunction to "vivre pour autrui" ("live for others"), from which comes the word "altruism".

The reason why there are newly developed stages after a certain time period is that the system "has lost its power" and is preventing the progression of civilization, causing complicated situations in society.

But in order to progress, there need to be the necessary consequences that come with it, which is caused by a "series of modifications, independent of the human will, to which all classes of society contributed, and of which kings themselves have often been the first agents and most eager promoters".

Therefore, it "represents these phenomena as being produced by a direct and continuous action of more or less numerous supernatural agents, whose arbitrary interventions explain all the apparent anomalies of the universe."

These natural spiritual beings who possessed souls and may exist apart from the material bodies were capable of interacting with humans, therefore requiring sacrifices and worship to please the agents.

It alone has the important property of offering us a provisional theory,… which immediately groups the first facts, with its help, by cultivating our capacity for observation, we were able to prepare the age of a wholly positive philosophy."

Comte momentarily admires the theological stage for its remarkable ability to enact this activity amidst a time when it was argued to be impractical.

The mind begins to notice the facts themselves, caused by the emptiness of the metaphysical agents through "over subtle qualification that all right-minded persons considered them to be only the abstract names of the phenomena in question".

The situation leads to human observation as a reflection of the tension in society can be reviewed, overall helping to enhance knowledge development.

The attention is drawn to science, hypothesis', natural law, and supernatural ideas, allows sociology to be divided into these two categories.

By combining the simple facts from the abstract to the supernatural and switching our thinking towards hypothetical observation, the sciences culminate in order to formulate sociology and this new societal division.

"Every social system… aims definitively at directing all special forces towards a general result, for the exercise of a general and combined activity is the essence of the society,"[30] Social phenomena Comte believed can be transferred into laws and that systemization could become the prime guide to sociology so that all can maintain knowledge to continue building a strong intellectual society.

[32][33] Beyond Comte's substantive theoretical corpus, a less well-known yet interesting aspect of his work is his reflections upon the relation between self and knowledge production.

As the methodologist Audrey Alejandro has elaborated,[35] these considerations by Comte foreshadow key concerns in contemporary social science regarding the importance of reflexivity, meaning by this the necessity to be critically aware and to assess the ways personal dispositions and unconscious discourses shape the production of knowledge.