Comte's positive polity, complete with a new spiritual power based on scientist- philosophers and a full- scale Religion of Humanity to ensure the perfect harmonization of feeling, thought and action, has not arrived. Nor will it ever. But what of that? The persistence of capitalism is not in itself a refutation of Marx. Nor is the fact that God has not yet died, or is even staging a grizzly comeback, a refutation of Feuerbach or Nietzsche. To put the point more generally: If History with a capital H, as conceived by the nineteenth- century dialecticians of progress, appears to have come to an end before its consummation, this does not render their analyses of what precedes that consummation entirely without interest. Indeed, the notion of being stuck in the penultimate might offer some clue to what, from a progressive viewpoint, is most paradoxical about the present era.

It is in that spirit that the following remarks are offered on Comte's analysis of the “great crisis” that framed his understanding of his own present, and of the question concerning the post- theistic future of religion that he took to be at its heart. Of course, to treat the situation he problematized under the sign of metaphysics as a moment of indefinite duration rather than a transient upheaval before humanity comes fully into its own, is to separate his question from his answer, and above all from his teleology. But if bracketing, in this way, the positivist sublation to whose performative description Comte devoted so many thousands of pages truncates his thought, it also has the merit of highlighting what the attempted closures of his endless systematizing concealed: the enormity of the problem he felt called upon to surmount, and what, in his own terms, was at stake.