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Licentiousness, cruelty, and vice "Positivism," or the substitution of the harlotry of the passions for the calm and elevating influences of reason and religion. How can it be otherwise?
There were to be priests for the performance of these sacraments and for the inculcation of the doctrines of positivism. There were to be temples of humanity, affording opportunity for and reminder of this worship. In each temple there was to be set up the symbol of the positivist religion, a woman of thirty years with her little son in her arms.
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.
When the Russians drank up the contents of the widow Clicquot's cellars, they found a sweet natural wine, to which they have constantly adhered. But Western Europe, all the Europe which, as M. Comte puts it, "synergizes" after light and positivism, has tended towards champagnes more or less dry.
The student of Vergil should rather remember how great was the need of that age for some practical philosophy capable of lifting the mind out of the stupor in which a hybrid mythology had left it, and how, when Platonic idealism had been wrecked by the skeptics, and Stoicism with its hypothetical premises had repelled many students, Epicurean positivism came as a saving gospel of enlightenment.
Resolutely they united the forces of the nation, which at first opposed them from ignorance, and broke down the selfishness and dogmatic positivism of the popular representatives. A victorious campaign settled matters with Austria, who did not willingly cede the supremacy in Germany, and left the German Imperial confederation without forfeiting her place as a Great Power.
For my own very limited acquaintance with it, I am indebted to the extreme kindness of my friend, Professor Croom Robertson, who has most obligingly favoured me with a manuscript version of the portion referred to in the text. 'Lay Sermons, p. 240. 'Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin, 1799, pp. 214-6. 'Auguste Comte and Positivism, passim. 'History of Philosophy, 4th edition, vol. ii. pp. 654-735.
To live we must have an ideal, and pessimism offers none. So far it is inferior even to positivism." "Pessimism offers no ideal! It offers the highest not to create life is the only good; the creation of life is the only evil; all else which man in his bestial stupidity calls good and evil is ephemeral and illusionary."
Comte in founding his philosophy of Positivism seems to have had in view some such Holy Human Church, but he succeeded in making it all so profoundly dull that it never flourished, The seed of Life was not in it.
We must look for the origins of Whitman, I think, in the deep world-currents that have been shaping the destinies of the race for the past hundred years or more; in the universal loosening, freeing, and removing obstructions; in the emancipation of the people, and their coming forward and taking possession of the world in their own right; in the triumph of democracy and of science; the downfall of kingcraft and priestcraft; the growth of individualism and non-conformity; the increasing disgust of the soul of man with forms and ceremonies; the sentiment of realism and positivism, the religious hunger that flees the churches; the growing conviction that life, that nature, are not failures, that the universe is good, that man is clean and divine inside and out, that God is immanent in nature, all these things and more lie back of Whitman, and hold a causal relation to him.
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