Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 7, 2025
To use his favourite language, therefore, he still regarded a 'sanction' as absolutely necessary to the efficacy of moral or religious teaching. His constant criticism upon positivists and agnostics is that their creeds afford no satisfactory sanction. They cannot give to the bad man a reason for being good. But he was equally opposed to sham sanctions and sham claims to authority.
But never did I so desire it as in the cathedrals of Winchester, Notre Dame, Amiens. One winter's day I traveled from Munich to Ulm because I imagined from what the art books said that the cathedral hoarded a medieval statement of the Positivists' final synthesis, prefiguring their conception of a "Supreme Humanity." In this I was not altogether disappointed.
On the other hand, the Positivists, so far as they accept the teachings of their master, roundly assert, at any rate in words, that observation of the mind is a thing inherently impossible in itself, and that psychology is a chimera a phantasm generated by the fermentation of the dregs of theology.
The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot show that quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of the "positivists," Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to speak there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement.
He does not wish to affirm anything, but he does affirm that actual state of science does not permit of any further deductions than those which on the strength of the observation of known facts can be deducted, therefore one must hold them, and neglect the others. In that respect his prejudices do not tell us anything more than newspaper articles, written by young positivists.
The Christian doctrine has nothing in common with the doctrine of the Positivists, Communists, and all the apostles of the universal brotherhood of mankind, based on the general advantage of such a brotherhood. They differ from one another especially in Christianity's having a firm and clear basis in the human soul, while love for humanity is only a theoretical deduction from analogy.
From the same optimistic conception of a rational guidance of the world is derived the theory of the continuous and necessary progress of humanity. Although it has been adopted by the positivists, this is merely a metaphysical hypothesis. In the ordinary sense of the word, "progress" is merely a subjective expression denoting those changes which follow the direction of our preferences.
Oh, by the way, when my book on Comte comes out, I may have to buckle on my armor again; I suppose there will be strife and war and deadly thrusts; unless, indeed, the Positivists may not consider me worth answering. However, that is of no consequence; it's about Linn I have come down; and really, Miss Francie, I fear he is in a bad way, and that he is taking a worse way to get out of it."
Yet he foolishly admits that "the Positivists in our own day have strongly insisted on this great crowning truth which we Christians have neglected." Nay, he states that when Kossuth appealed in England on behalf of Hungary, he spoke in the name of the "solidarity" of the human race. And why solidarity? Because the word had to be taken from the French. And why from the French?
In its new-fangled disguise the truth and virtue of the doctrine were still operative, and the emotional crisis through which I passed I found was as essentially religious as it was in form unorthodox. "At the end of sophomore year there were a half-dozen very positive young Positivists in our class. The pride of intellect which we felt in our new enlightenment was intoxicating.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking