The third and highest state of human knowledge according to nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte. According to Comte, humans evolve through three distinct states of social being: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. The first, primitive state of social life is the theological, in which humans progress from pagan fetishism to monotheism; the second, slightly more advanced state, is the metaphysical, so called because in it humans turn away from the supernatural, but nonetheless search for secular powers like ânatureâ; the third, and final stage, is positivism, in which humans use science to ask how things work, rather than why they are there. The aim of positivism is to discover the immutable universal laws governing the known universe by virtue of scientific analysis and observation.