No readers of these lectures should I ever think it necessary to prove that ideas govern and upset the world, or, in other terms, that the whole social mechanism rests, at bottom, on opinions. They are acutely aware that the great political and moral crisis in present-day society is due, in the last analysis, to our intellectual anarchy. Our most serious distress is caused by the profound differences of opinion that at present exist among all minds as to all those fundamental maxims the stability of which is the prime requisite for a real social order. So long as individual minds fail to give unanimous assent to a certain number of general ideas capable of constituting a common social doctrine, we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that the nations will necessarily remain in an essentially revolutionary atmosphere … It is just as certain that if this gathering of minds to one communion of principles can once be attained, the appropriate institutions will necessarily take shape from it.

Cours de philosophie positive, Auguste Comte