In the demonstration of his laws by the actual course of civilisation, Comte adopts what he calls “the happy artifice of Condorcet,” and treats the successive peoples who pass on the torch as if they were a single people running the race.  This is “a rational fiction,” for a people’s true successors are those who pursue its efforts.  And, like Bossuet and Condorcet, he confined his review to European civilisation; he considered only the elite or advance guard of humanity.  He deprecated the introduction of China or India, for instance, as a confusing complication.  He ignored the roles of Brahmanism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism.  His synthesis, therefore, cannot claim to be a synthesis of universal history; it is only a synthesis of the movement of European history.  In accordance with the law of the three stages, the development falls into three great periods.  The first or Theological came to an end about A.D. 1400, and the second or Metaphysical is now nearing its close, to make way for the third or Positive, for which Comte was preparing the way.

The Theological period has itself three stages, in which Fetishism, Polytheism, and Monotheism successively prevail.  The chief social characteristics of the Polytheistic period are the institution of slavery and the coincidence or “confusion” of the spiritual and temporal powers.  It has two stages:  the theocratic, represented by Egypt, and the military, represented by Rome, between which Greece stands in a rather embarrassing and uneasy position.

The initiative for the passage to the Monotheistic period came from Judaea, and Comte attempts to show that this could not have been otherwise.  His analysis of this period is the most interesting part of his survey.  The chief feature of the political system corresponding to monotheism is the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers; the function of the spiritual power being concerned with education, and that of the temporal with action, in the wide senses of those terms.  The defects of this dual system were due to the irrational theology.  But the theory of papal infallibility was a great step in intellectual and social progress, by providing a final jurisdiction, without which society would have been troubled incessantly by contests arising from the vague formulae of dogmas.  Here Comte had learned from Joseph de Maistre.  But that thinker would not have been edified when Comte went on to declare that in the passage from polytheism to monotheism the religious spirit had really declined, and that one of the merits of Catholicism was that it augmented the domain of human wisdom at the expense of divine inspiration. [Footnote:  Cours de philosophic positive, vi. 354.] If it be said that the Catholic system promoted the empire of the clergy rather than the interests of religion, this was all to the good; for it placed the practical use of religion in “the provisional elevation of a noble speculative corporation eminently able to direct opinions and morals.”