The law of the Three Stages is discredited.  It may be contended that general Progress depends on intellectual progress, and that theology, metaphysics, and science have common roots, and are ultimately identical, being merely phases in the movement of the intelligence.  But the law of this movement, if it is to rank as a scientific hypothesis, must be properly deduced from known causes, and must then be verified by a comparison with historical facts.  Comte thought that he fulfilled these requirements, but in both respects his demonstration was defective. [Footnote:  Criticism of Comte’s assumption that civilisation begins with animism:  Weber’s criticisms from this point of view are telling (Le Rythme du progres, 73-95).  He observes that if Comte had not left the practical and active side of intelligence in the shade and considered only its speculative side, he could not have formulated the law of the Three Stages.  He would have seen that “the positive explanation of phenomena has played in every period a preponderant role, though latent, in the march of the human mind.”  Weber himself suggests a scheme of two states (corresponding to the two-sidedness of the intellect), technical and speculative, practical and theoretical, through the alternation of which intellectual progress has been effected.  The first stage was probably practical (he calls it proto-technic).  It is to be remembered that when Comte was constructing his system palaeontology was in its infancy.]

The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the gratuitous assumption that man in the earliest stage of his existence had animistic beliefs and that the first phase of his progress was controlled by fetishism.  There is no valid evidence that fetishism is not a relatively late development, or that in the myriads of years stretching back beyond our earliest records, during which men decided the future of the human species by their technical inventions and the discovery of fire, they had any views which could be called religious or theological.  The psychology of modern savages is no clew to the minds of the people who wrought tools of stone in the world of the mammoth and the rhinoceros TICHIRHINUS.  If the first stage of man’s development, which was of such critical importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte’s law of progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.

In another way, Comte’s system may be criticised for failing to cover the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history.  In accordance with “the happy artifice of Condorcet,” he assumes that the growth of European civilisation is the only history that matters, and discards entirely the civilisations, for instance, of India and China.  This assumption is much more than an artifice, and he has not scientifically justified it. [Footnote:  A propos of the view that only European civilisation matters it has been well observed that “human history is not unitary but pluralistic”:  F. J. Teggart, The Processes of History, p. 24 (1918).]