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It is quite true that the reaction against Positivism is making itself felt among our literary fellow-students, and that they, like others, are haunted by the idea of that famous bankruptcy of science. This is perhaps due to their masters, the neo-spiritualists and dogmatical rhetoricians into whose hands they have fallen.
Comte has pointed out, in the fifth chapter of his "General View of Positivism," and elsewhere, that it is not enough to enunciate sound principles of social renovation unless they can be rendered visible and palpable.
A genuine religion, as he says in a remarkable letter, must be founded, like all knowledge, on facts. Now the religions which include a theology rest on no facts which can stand criticism. They are, therefore, doomed to disappear. But the religions which exclude theology he mentions Buddhism and Positivism as examples give no adequate sanction.
While the toiling multitude suffers from its hard lot and 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.
But facts must be 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.
High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life with its craving for immortality.
Their young criticism was sent into the world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in its old age, it is invoked to keep open the door to superstition. Some of those reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of a physical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute for the cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradition.
Moreover, it was scientific Positivism that he clung to; in his hatred of all mysticism he would have naught to do with the fantastic religious leanings of Comte in his last years. And in Morin's brave, consistent, somewhat mournful life, there had been but one page of romance: the sudden feverish impulse which had carried him off to fight in Sicily by Garibaldi's side.
In the first adaptation, Hebrew positivism was wonderfully refined, transformed into a religion of redemption, and endowed with a semi-pagan mythology, a pseudo-Platonic metaphysics, and a quasi-Roman organisation.
It is quite true that the reaction against Positivism is making itself felt among our literary fellow-students, and that they, like others, are haunted by the idea of that famous bankruptcy of science. This is perhaps due to their masters, the neo-spiritualists and dogmatical rhetoricians into whose hands they have fallen.
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