One of the minds however which was trained in the school of St. Simon, viz. Comte,(877) has developed a system known by the name of Positivism, which in its effects is not merely thus negative, but amounts to positive and dogmatic unbelief. He showed traces of the school from which he sprang, both in considering politics to be the highest science, in regarding humanity as a progress, and in adducing individualism as the sole cause of social evil and anarchy. He commenced similarly by taking an estimate of the present state of knowledge, and seizing the law which presides over the progress of knowledge.(878) This law he stated as consisting of three stages, through which each science passes as it grows to perfection; the first, the theological or imaginative stage, wherein the mind inquires into final causes, and refers phenomena to special providence; the second, the metaphysical, wherein the idea of supernatural or personal causes being discarded, it seeks for abstract essences; the third, the positive, wherein it rests content with generalized facts, and does not ask for causes.(879) The first in its religious phase is theistic; the second pantheistic; the third atheistic. The perfection of science consists in reaching the third stage, wherein the knowledge is strictly generalized from sensation. Having thus seized the law which presides over intellectual development, and settled the limits of the human reason to be confined to phenomena, agreeing in this respect with the ideologists, and opposed to Cousin, he next offered a classification of the sciences, commencing with the simplest, and showing that, as the mind passes from the simple to the complex, the methods of investigation multiply; accompanying his account by a delineation of the steps in each case by which science attains perfection; and thus gradually ascending to the science of man(880) and society, to which the preliminary investigation had been the preface, designed to prepare the way for showing how the science of society may be similarly brought into the positive stage.