The ultimate — what this line takes as final
L
Le Grand Etre.
Depicted as a woman holding a child, in an unembarrassed borrowing from Catholic iconography. Comte was explicit that the imitation was the point.
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Saints & exemplars — lives held up as the pattern
C
Clotilde de Vaux.
Comte knew her for about a year before she died. He then rebuilt his entire system around the primacy of feeling and prayed to her three times a day for the remaining eleven years of his life.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
The Great Being is Humanity, and most of it is dead.
Comte's object of worship is the species as a continuing organism. Since the dead outnumber the living enormously and built everything the living use, the dead are most of what is being worshipped.
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The dead govern the living.
Comte meant it as a description before a slogan: language, science, law, tools and cities are all bequests, and the living operate almost entirely inside decisions made by people they cannot consult.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
One knowable world, understood through the positive sciences, with nothing behind it
After death
Subjective immortality: the dead continue in the memory and the effects of the living, and nowhere else.