 As suggested in 1620 by Francis Bacon, developed by Saint-Simon, and promulgated in the 1830s by his former student Comte, positivism was the first modern philosophy of science.Human knowledge had evolved from religion to metaphysics to science, explained Comte, which had flowed from mathematics to astronomy to physics to chemistry to biology to sociology—in that order—describing increasingly intricate domains, all of society's knowledge having become scientific, while questions of theology and of metaphysics remained unanswerable.Comte found enumerative induction reliable upon the experience available, and asserted that science's proper use is improving human society, not attaining metaphysical truth.