SOURCE: "Conclusion," in Auguste Comte, Twayne Publishers, 1981, pp. 154-58.

In the following essay, Standley discusses the paradoxical legacy of Comte and his philosophy.

The space of more than a century between us and Comte has done little to clarify his image. Now, the paradoxes of his own nature are overlaid with the multiple reflections, compounded of everything from firmly delineated parts to free-floating myth. We are challenged to define the impact on society of a man whose characteristics could be so negatively summed up as they are by Sir Isaiah Berlin: "His grotesque pedantry, the unreadable dullness of his writing, his vanity, his eccentricity, his solemnity, the pathos of his private life, his insane dogmatism, his authoritarianism, his philosophical fallacies. . . . [his] naïve craving for unity and symmetry at the expense of experience," his "bureaucratic fantasies. . . . with his fanatically tidy world of human beings joyfully engaged in fulfilling...