Having concluded that the theological stage was over, Comte drew a conclusion most of his admirers found insupportable: that the social functions religion had performed were still necessary, and that positivism would therefore have to perform them. From the 1840s he set about designing a cult in detail.
Its object of worship is the Great Being, Humanity itself, understood as the continuous community of the living, the dead and those still to come, to whom every individual owes almost everything he has. There is a Positivist Calendar of thirteen months of twenty eight days, each month named after a great figure, with individual days assigned to lesser ones, so that the year becomes a walk through the history of human achievement. There are nine sacraments marking the stages of a life, a priesthood of positivist philosophers, temples, and a formula that summarises the whole: love as the principle, order as the basis, progress as the end.
The reception split his movement. Thomas Henry Huxley's verdict, that positivism was Catholicism minus Christianity, is the line everyone remembers, and John Stuart Mill, who had admired the earlier work, treated the later system as a warning. Yet it was not a private eccentricity. Positivist churches were founded in France and England, and in Brazil the movement became a political force: a Positivist temple still stands in Rio de Janeiro, and the words on the Brazilian flag, Ordem e Progresso, are taken from Comte's formula.