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And what is rarer than a life to which that praise can be given? It is amusing to note the superficial forms of reaction against scientific positivism. The triumph of Darwin was signalized by the invention of that happy word Agnostic, which had great vogue. But agnosticism, as a fashion, was far too reasonable to endure.
He believed so firmly and intensely in his own religion a kind of passionate positivism, a creed which seemed to have no God because it was all God that he felt convinced he only needed to destroy accepted figments, for the light which blazed around him to break through and flood the world with beauty.
Merezhkovsky affirms that the Chinese and the Japanese, being the most complete and the most persevering representatives of this "terrestrial" religion, will without fail conquer Europe, where positivism still bears some traces of Christian romanticism.
On the contrary, Stirner appears to be rather inclined to Positivism, and to consider the details of life and of perception as real, and as the only ones whose existence is justified.
Such modification of his being cannot be deemed impossible; many signs of our life to-day seem to point towards it. If the habits of thought favoured by physical science do but sink deep enough, and no vast calamity come to check mankind in its advance to material contentment, the age of true positivism may arise.
And yet this last is infinitely more striking and more tragic, inasmuch as it affects a more important section of mankind. I, at any rate, am not one of those who would seek to minimise the results of this decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that Positivism or "evolutional morality" will ever satisfy the race.
When we think that this was the epoch of positivism that is to say, of those who could not believe without touching, we are profoundly impressed by this reflection: The intelligence, then, is threatened by dangers, like the spirit.
In treating, again, of the Critical or destructive system of Metaphysics, and of the Positive or reconstructive system of the New Philosophy, he 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.
There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple; near may not come the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, nor the profound greyness of Hegelism, but merely the genial love and reverence of a beautiful-minded woman. Such charms as these necessitate certain defects, I should say limitations.
He was an absolute positivist; his positivism did not make him self-assertive nor peremptory; on the contrary, it oppressed him. But why should this sad state of mind, which has been expressed by great men in all literatures, be so exceptionally prominent among the Russians, and particularly among the modern ones?
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