Darwinism was received in Latin America always in relationship, whether explicit or not, with positivism, a term first used by the social philosopher Saint-Simon to refer to scientific method and its extension to philosophy: scientific knowledge was viewed as “positive.” As reformulated by Auguste Comte, positivism came to be a system of thought in which science was the only source of authority. It was not a philosophy of science, had no universal notion of truth, and did not promote specific methods or laws. In Europe, it was envisioned as a kind of capstone to the scientific revolution. In Latin America, however, positivism (in its Comtean form) preceded the instauration of science; therefore, it was programmatic, and one of the programs was science (Fig. 31.1).

Schools of Thought

Positivism came in two varieties, Comtean (“social positivism”) and Spencerian (“evolutionary positivism”). Social positivism promoted a more just society through the application of science. Evolutionary positivism was associated with Herbert Spencer and, of course, with Darwin. In Spencer’s writings there was a stress on universal progress as a continuous, unilinear evolution from a primitive nebula to human civilization. He used the term “evolution” as a synonym of progress even before the publication of the Origin of Species (1859), and Darwin’s theory simply gave substance to his view of a general evolutionary process characterized by the passage from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex.