This English edition of The Catechism of Positive Religion was published in 1891, thirty-four years after the death of Comte, the French philosopher of science and politics and founder of positivism, whose work was widely read in the later nineteenth century. Comte's self-published French original of 1852, translated here, outlines his progressive ideal of 'sociocracy', which would provide a systematic basis, free of metaphysics, for intellectual and moral transactions among humans. Congreve's edition, in common with others, divides the book into five parts. The introduction contains two dialogues, entitled General Theory of Religion and Theory of Humanity. Parts 1-3 respectively consider the Positivist's private and public 'worship'; 'doctrine', including the external world and human society and ethics; and 'regime' or way of life, private and public. The final two dialogues cover polytheism, monotheism and theocracy. This book remains of interest as an early precursor of secular humanist ethics.

This book is about the life and times of Richard Congreve. This polemicist was the first thinker to gain instant infamy for publishing cogent critiques of imperialism in Victorian Britain. As the foremost British acolyte of Auguste Comte, Congreve sought to employ the philosopher’s new science of sociology to dismantle the British Empire. With an aim to realise in its place Comte’s global vision of utopian socialist republican city-states, the former Oxford don and ex-Anglican minister launched his Church of Humanity in 1859. Over the next forty years, Congreve engaged in some of the most pressing foreign and domestic controversies of his day, despite facing fierce personal attacks in the Victorian press. Congreve made overlooked contributions to the history of science, political economy, and secular ethics. In this book Matthew Wilson argues that Congreve’s polemics, ‘in the name of Humanity’, served as the devotional practices of his Positivist church.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1857.