Study of religion

The early 19th century

Hegel, as an idealist, stressed the formative power of the spiritual on human history. By contrast, the French social philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857), from a positivistic and materialist point of view, devised a different evolutionary scheme in which there are three stages of human history: the theological, in which the supernatural is important; the metaphysical, in which the explanatory concepts become more abstract; and the positivistic—i.e., the empirical. A rather different positivism was expressed by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903); in it religion has a place beside science in attempting to refer to the unknown ... (100 of 18,788 words)