Read the passage carefully. The questions are based on this paragraph.

This approach to knowledge was modeled on natural science and directed against traditional religious claims of understanding the essential or ultimate nature of things. Comte viewed a "theological" stage of understanding as the most primitive of three stages through which all fields of knowledge advance. In the theological stage, events are explained in terms of the will of spirits or gods or other beings. Animists who see a volcano as an expression of the Spirit of the Mountain, or monotheists who see it as God's will; adopt such explanations. So do those who see a person's behaviour as caused by their inner desires or intentions. In the second, "metaphysical" stage, explanation is couched in terms of abstractions that are taken as real things, such as "essences, quiddities, virtues residing in things" (Mill : 16). Explaining performance on school-like tasks as ċaused by "intelligence," or creative behavior as caused by "creativity," are modern examples. Each simply names the pattern of behaviour and then attributes its cause to the named "thing."

For Comte, both theological and metaphysical explanations are inevitably superseded by a third, "positive" stage, in which explanation is couched in, terms of scientific laws stating relationships between prior and posterior conditions. Evolution through these stages was thought to take place first in those fields that are most general, simple and independent, such as astronomy, physics and chemistry and building on those, to gradually work up to the more special, complicated and dependent fields such as physiology (biology) and social physics (sociology). (Mathematics was put at the head of the list as a sort of special case.)