"Positivism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the marks would pass unobserved if the knowledge of their cause had not been preserved in the family. A bust of Montesquieu made in his life-time shows him with closely-cropped hair, and without a wig. It is a remarkably Caesar-like head, every feature indicating the decision and positivism of the Roman character—such a one, indeed, as ideally became the author of the 'Considerations.' But how the face is altered when we look at it in another portrait—a painted one, representing the writer in a great wig as President of the Parliament of Guyenne! ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... adduces no evidence to show that the same element is negatived by the one and restored by the other; on the contrary, were his statement true in all respects, it would only serve to prove that the Theological element, which is slowly dissipated by Metaphysics, is formally and finally abjured by Positivism. He assumes and asserts, on very insufficient grounds, that there is a real, radical, and necessary contrariety between the facts and laws of Science and the first principles of Theology, whether natural or revealed; and he anticipates, therefore, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... COMTISM, or POSITIVISM. A philosophy taught by one Auguste Comte, a Frenchman, who was born in 1798, and died 1857. He denied the Deity, and introduced the worship of Humanity. In his religion, which must not be confounded with his philosophy, there are many festivals, ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... were closed, he was asked by the leader (not Mr. Noyes) whether he desired to say any thing. Retaining his seat, he said that he had suffered for some time past from certain intellectual difficulties and doubts—a leaning especially toward positivism, and lack of faith; being drawn away from God; a tendency to think religion of small moment. But that he was combating the evil spirit within him, and hoped he had gained somewhat; and ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... investigated on the foundation of scientific science, i.e., of the two hypotheses of positivism and evolution, which are not borne out by any thing, and which give themselves out as undoubted truths. And the reigning science announces, with delusive solemnity, that the solution of all problems of life is possible only through the study of facts, of nature, and, in particular, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... his famous Rapport sur la philosophic en France au xix siecle, published in 1867, prophesied as follows: "Many signs permit us to foresee in the near future a philosophical epoch of which the general character will be the predominance of what may be called spiritualistic realism or positivism, having as generating principle the consciousness which the mind has of itself of an existence recognized as being the source and support of every other existence, being none ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... way of regarding the matter which has led Dr. Watts to propose an alliance between religion and science, and which produces the arguments one sometimes sees in defence of Christianity against Positivism, drawn from a consideration of the services which Christianity has rendered to the race, and of the gloomy and desolate condition in which its disappearance would leave the world. Tyndall and Huxley do not, however, occupy the position of religious ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... prone to positivism and kindred forms of materialistic philosophy, and we must expect the derivative theory to be taken up in that interest. We have no predilection for that school, but the contrary. If we had, we might have looked complacently upon a line of criticism which would indirectly, but effectively, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... was like a tale out of the fairy-books, this miraculous deliverance of her forefathers in the dim haze of antiquity; true enough but not more definitely realized on that account. And yet not easily dissoluble links were being forged with her race, which has anticipated Positivism in vitalizing history by ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... instinct" in man, and that however coldly philosophers may reason, however sternly science may speak, there is in man some upwelling power which refuses to take the agnosticism of the intellect, as it refuses to accept the positivism of the senses; and with that every ruler of men has to deal, with that every statesman has to reckon. There is something in man which from time to time wells up with irresistible power, sweeping away every ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... secularism; syncretism^. [religious sects.] protestantism, Arianism^, Adventism, Jansenism, Stundism^, Erastianism^, Calvinism, quakerism^, methodism, anabaptism^, Puseyism, tractarianism^, ritualism, Origenism, Sabellianism, Socinianism^, Deism, Theism, materialism, positivism, latitudinarianism &c High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, Free Church; ultramontanism^; papism, papistry; monkery^; papacy; Anglicanism, Catholicism, Romanism; popery, Scarlet Lady, Church of Rome, Greek Church. paganism, heathenism, ethicism^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... though it may not be positivism pure and simple, shows a preponderating influence of Comte and his school, and its attitude toward religion is approximately that of Herbert Spencer and Stuart Mill. The constellation under which Brandes was born into the world of thought ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... cannot doubt the madness of Auguste Comte. It was manifested in public on the 12th of April, 1826, and interrupted the success of his lectures, which had attracted all the leading minds of the time, including Humboldt himself. After a violent attack of mania, the founder of the philosophy of Positivism took refuge at Montmorency. From there he was with difficulty brought back to Paris and placed under the care of the celebrated alienist, Esquirol. He was released when only partially cured, and at the instigation of his mother consented ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... "The Scientific Aspects of Positivism," Fortnightly Review, 1869, republished in ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... their own." "They are exquisitely graceful re- statements of the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F. D. Maurice and Jowett—a combination of Maurice's somewhat illogical piety with Jowett's philosophy of mystification." The piety of Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is logical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it. But as Jowett's earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could influence Tennyson before ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... him; and the immediate effect is to lessen his interest in all that stands on other bases. This he feels in spite of himself; he struggles against it in vain; and he finds perhaps to his alarm that he is drifting fast into what looks at first like pure Positivism. This is an inevitable result of the scientific training. It is quite erroneous to suppose that science ever overthrows Faith, if by that is implied that any natural truth can oppose successfully any single spiritual truth. Science cannot overthrow Faith; but it shakes ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... When, however, The New Republic had been completed and given to the world, I felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by another—The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's Candide. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... demands that in any fresh division of wealth it shall be ensured at least its daily bread, the elite is no better satisfied, but complains of the void induced by the freeing of its reason and the enlargement of its intelligence. It is the famous bankruptcy of rationalism, of positivism, of science itself which is in question. Minds consumed by need of the absolute grow weary of groping, weary of the delays of science which recognises only proven truths; doubt tortures them, they need a complete and immediate synthesis in order to sleep in peace; and they ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... will have the fate of Warsaw, and you distress me, you with your enthusiasm for the Republic. At the moment when we are overcome by the plainest positivism, how can you still believe in phantoms? Whatever happens, the people who are now in power will be sacrificed, and the Republic will follow their fate. Observe that I defend that poor Republic; but I ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Chernyshevski, Dobrolubov, Pisaryev, Buckle, Darwin, Spencer, became also the idols of the Jewish youth. The heads which had but recently been bending over the Talmud folios in the stuffy atmosphere of the heders and yeshibahs were now crammed with the ideas of positivism, evolution, and socialism. Sharp and sudden was the transition from rabbinic scholasticism and soporific hasidic mysticism to this new world of ideas, flooded with the light of science, to these new revelations announcing the glad tidings of the freedom of thought, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... understood: an appeal to common sense is not an appeal to thought that grovels, to narrow positivism which denies everything it cannot see or touch. For to wish that man should be absorbed in material sensations, to the exclusion of the high realities of the inner life, is also a want of good sense. Here we touch upon a tender point, round which ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... or, as it is more correctly called, the "dormitory," of my club, I had been reading a volume named "Sur l'Humanite Posthume," by M. D'Assier, a French follower of Comte. The mixture of positivism and ghost-stories highly diverted me. Moved by the sagacity and pertinence of M. D'Assier's arguments for a limited and fortuitous immortality, I fell into such an uncontrollable fit of laughter as caused, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang |
