During this era of decomposition there will commence the reconstruction of human opinion on new and more solid foundations; and the transition from Monotheism to Positive Science will be the greatest achievement of the race, greater far than the advancement from Fetishism to Polytheism, or even from Polytheism to Monotheism itself.

The culminating point of human progress is absolute and universal Atheism.[65] Surely such a prospect may well arrest the most thoughtless, and prompt them to inquire, with some measure of moral earnestness, What _is_ this Positive Philosophy, this ultimate landing-place of human thought, this final goal of human progress?
Is it nothing else than the Inductive Science of Bacon, but under a new and less attractive name?
or is it a philosophy radically different from it, and entitled, therefore, to be regarded as an original method?
The author tells us that he might have called it "Natural Science," or "the Philosophy of Nature," since it treats of Facts and their Laws; but that he had been induced to prefer the distinctive title of _positive_, as one better fitted to mark the contrast between it and the _negative_ character of those metaphysical and theological systems which it is destined to supersede.

And yet it will be found that, in so far as it differs at all from the Inductive Science of Bacon, it is purely _negative_, since its chief characteristic is the negation of all Theology, and the entire exclusion from the domain of human knowledge, of Causes, whether efficient or final.

It _adds_ nothing to the sum of human thought which might not be reached by Bacon's method; it only _subtracts_ whatever has reference to the Divine and Supernatural, and especially everything connected with the theory of Causation.

It makes no new contribution to the general stock, unless, indeed, it be the hitherto unknown law of development which is supposed to regulate and determine the progress of humanity from primeval Fetishism to ultimate Atheism; and it takes away Theology, with all its ennobling beliefs and blessed hopes, not by grappling with and solving, but by merely discarding the problem both of the origin and end of the world.
That this is a correct account of the new theory is evident from his own words: "The fundamental character of the Positive Philosophy is, to regard all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural _laws_, the precise discovery of which, and their reduction to the least possible number, is the end of all our efforts; while we regard the investigation of what are called _causes_, whether first or final, as absolutely _inaccessible and void of sense for us_." ...