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Updated: April 30, 2025
This, Comte denominates the "metaphysical" stage, mainly, because the solutions given were bound up with abstractions of physical realities. Thus, if you asked Aristotle why a vegetable grew, he would reply that it had a "nutritive soul," or principle, which enabled it to assimilate food.
The leaders, the steering committee and the inner circle, are in direct contact with their environment. They may, to be sure, have a very limited notion of what they ought to define as the environment, but they are not dealing almost wholly with abstractions.
They talked on, these clamorous sceptics, amplifying the Lassalle legend, broidering it with Messianic myths, with the same fantastic Oriental invention that had illuminated the plain Pentateuch with imaginative vignettes, and transfiguring the dry abstractions of Socialism with the same passionate personalization. He listened impatiently.
If you expect such obedience, amongst your other innovations and regenerations, you ought to make a revolution in Nature, and provide a new constitution, for the human mind: otherwise your supreme government cannot harmonize with its executory system. There are cases in which we cannot take up with names and abstractions.
Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God.
On this very lucid and satisfactory account of the origin of the Papal power, S is convinced at once, and is finally dismissed shamefaced, with the unanswerable interrogation, "whether the real object of the Revolution is not to create new men, new nations, new reason, new humanity, and a new God?" The three abstractions, S, M, D, then re-assemble to recant their errors.
Sometimes I have fancied that there is a great well of feeling behind Hugh's silence. And more than that that there is something in his life of which just now he cannot speak, which is keeping him living in great places. His abstractions are not ordinary ones, you know. It's just an idea of mine, but the other day well, something happened which I thought rather queer.
There is no 'mere theology' in Scripture; and it does not speak of 'attributes, nor give dry abstractions of infinitude, eternity, omniscience, unchangeableness, but lays stress on the personality of God, which is so apt to escape us in these abstract conceptions, and thus teaches us to think of this personal God our Father, as infinite, eternal, knowing all things, and never changing.
Of late, however, these principles have been brought to bear upon the system, and it manifestly is already giving way. The groans of the monster prove that those rays of truth, which did not disturb him whilst they continued to move in the parallel lines of abstractions and generalities, make it quite too hot for him since they are converged to a burning focus upon his devoted head.
Perhaps indeed the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same to bring people back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete. If any are too glaring they will be corrected in a future edition.
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