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Then there followed a Socialist an eager, ugly, black-bearded little fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of doing without 'any cultus whatsoever, threw scorn on both the Christians and the Positivists for refusing so to deny themselves, and appealed earnestly to his group of hearers 'to help in brining religion back from heaven to earth, where it belongs. Mr.
The anti-religious bigotry of Positivists is quite as bitter and irrational as the theological bigotry of religious fanatics. At present the two powers countervail and balance each other. But, as three hundred years ago I should certainly have been burnt for a heretic, so fifty or a hundred years hence, could I live so long, I should be in equal apprehension of being burnt by some successor of Mr.
He belongs to that school of able, but dogmatic positivists, who are apt to consider their minds the measure of the human mind, who are intolerant of those human sentiments and qualities in which they are deficient, and who, occupying the serene heights of a purely scientific wisdom, look down with pitying contempt on all intellects, however powerful, which are not emancipated from the dominion of theological ideas.
And this absurd can only base itself upon the most absolute uncertainty. The rational dissolution ends in dissolving reason itself; it ends in the most absolute scepticism, in the phenomenalism of Hume or in the doctrine of absolute contingencies of Stuart Mill, the most consistent and logical of the positivists.
I was enormously interested in the Positivists during these European years; I imagined that their philosophical conception of man's religious development might include all expressions of that for which so many ages of men have struggled and aspired. I vaguely hoped for this universal comity when I stood in Stonehenge, on the Acropolis in Athens, or in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
In this I have the Positivists with me. Even in Caesar's lifetime the world had a taste of the vicissitudes of empire while he was revelling in the palace of Cleopatra and leaving affairs to Antony and Dolabella. Perhaps the satiety of the voluptuary had something to do with the recklessness with which at the last he neglected to guard his life.
Their pantheism under these circumstances makes them the more energetic and turns them into practical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists for all its conventions.
In this is the fundamental difference between the Christian doctrine and the doctrine of the Positivists, and all the theorizers about universal brotherhood on non-Christian principles. Such are the two principal misunderstandings relating to the Christian religion, from which the greater number of false reasonings about it proceed.
With these impressions in my mind, no one will be surprised if I acknowledge that, for these sixteen years, it has been a periodical source of irritation to me to find M. Comte put forward as a representative of scientific thought; and to observe that writers whose philosophy had its legitimate parent in Hume, or in themselves, were labelled "Comtists" or "Positivists" by public writers, even in spite of vehement protests to the contrary.
I have already spoken of many Gipsies reminding me, by their entirely unconscious ungodliness, of thorough Hegelians. I may now add, that, like the Positivists, they seem to correct their irreligion through the influence of love; and by a strange custom, which is, in spirit and fact, nothing less than adoring the departed and offering to the dead a singular sacrifice.
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