astronomical philosophy, arguing that astronomy stands out as the sole branch of natural philosophy that is free from theological and metaphysical influence. He emphasizes the need to define the scope of astronomical knowledge and underlines that human understanding of celestial bodies is primarily based on visual observations, limiting the study to geometric and mechanical phenomena. Comte establishes a distinction between the perfect study of our solar system and the more complex, less understood sphere of the universe, setting the stage for a detailed exploration of astronomical laws and their philosophical implications in the following sections of his discourse. (This is an automatically generated summary.)