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Updated: June 21, 2025
There was a certain narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us who are but moderately influenced by Comte's philosophy, and can make nothing of the religion of Humanity.
As a philosophy, Comtism has found its place and exercised its share of influence among the philosophies of the time but as a religious system it appears to make little way. It is the invention of a man not the spontaneous expression of the beliefs and feelings of mankind. Any one with a tolerably lively imagination might produce a rival system with as little practical effect.
But what has Comtism to do with the "New Philosophy," as the Archbishop defines it in the following passage? "Let me briefly remind you of the leading principles of this new philosophy. "All knowledge is experience of facts acquired by the senses.
But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spread the world would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy, but by the Comtist calendar. By discouraging what they conceive to be the weakness of their master, the English Positivists have broken the strength of their religion.
The few lines devoted to Comtism in my paper on the "Physical Basis of Life" were, in intention, strictly limited to these two purposes. But they seem to have given more umbrage than I intended they should, to the followers of M. Comte in this country, for some of whom, let me observe in passing, I entertain a most unfeigned respect; and Mr.
Nor is Comtism, any more than Plato's Republic and other Utopias, exempt from the infirmity of claiming finality for a flight of the individual imagination. It would shut up mankind for ever in a stereotyped organization which is the vision of a particular thinker.
This in all its parts its high priesthood, its hierarchy, its sacraments, its calendar, its hagiology, its literary canon, its ritualism, and we may add, in its fundamentally intolerant and inquisitorial character is an obvious reproduction of the Church of Rome, with humanity in place of God, great men in place of the saints, the Founder of Comtism in place of the Founder of Christianity, and even a sort of substitute for the Virgin in the shape of womanhood typified by Clotilde de Vaux.
One variety, however, the Comtist, far exceeds all the rest in the lengths to which it is carried by this propensity. If, in speaking as I am about to do of Comtism, I commit heedless of Mr.
Here are two propositions: the first, that the "Philosophie Positive" contains little or nothing of any scientific value; the second, that Comtism is, in spirit, anti-scientific. I shall endeavour to bring forward ample evidence in support of both.
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