At the first level...

At the first level, the most general idea, the idea of being, is posited, from within which the opposite, i.e., the idea of nothingness, emerges. Then they become mixed and take the form of the idea of “becoming”. Becoming, which is the synthesis of being (thesis) and nothingness (antithesis), in its turn is posited as a thesis, and its opposite appears from within it, and from the mixture of them a new synthesis occurs. This process continues until it reaches the most specific of concepts.

Hegel called this threefold (triadic) process “dialectic”, and he fancied that this was a universal law for the appearance of all mental and objective phenomena.

Positivism In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Frenchman Auguste Compte, who is called the father of sociology, founded an extreme form of empiricism called positivism, whose basis was limited to that which is given directly by the senses, and from one perspective it was considered the opposite of idealism.1 Compte even considered the abstract concepts of science that were not obtained from direct observation to be metaphysical and unscientific.

He even went so far as to consider metaphysical propositions to be basically absurd and meaningless words. Auguste Compte held that there were three stages of human thought: first, the divine and religious stage, which relates events to supernatural causes. Second is the philosophical stage, which seeks the cause of events in invisible substances and natures of things.

Third is the scientific stage, which instead of looking for the reason why phenomena occur, deals with the question of how they occur and their interrelationships, and this is the stage of positive science. It is strange that he at last confessed that religion is necessary for man, but he set humanity as its object of worship. He considered himself to be the messenger of this creed, and he set up rituals for individual and group worship.

The creed of the worship of man, which is a perfect example of humanism, found some followers in France, England, Sweden and in North and South America, who formally converted to this creed and established temples for the worship of man. It influenced others indirectly in ways that cannot be mentioned here. Rationalism and Empiricism Western philosophical schools are divided into two general groups: rationalist and empiricist.