Illustrations of Positivism; A Selection of Articles from the Positivist Review in Science, Philosophy, Religion, and Politics (Paperback)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1915. Excerpt: ... Chapter V THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY-confcW v SYMPATHY AND SYNTHESIS If I had to choose among the chapters of Comte's Positive Polity that which was most original, or at least most distinctive of a teacher of a new way of life, I should point to the first chapter of the second volume.1 No doubt scanty justice is done to any section of this work by separating it from the rest. Yet it seems to demarcate the writer more definitely than any other--not merely in philosophic method, but in temper of mind, in tone of feeling, in the standpoint from which he looked on life--from any teacher that the world has seen. I well remember its falling in my way at Oxford forty-five years ago.' I had not read any of Comte's writings before, and this no doubt may partly account for the depth of the impression made. But every subsequent reading has made it deeper. What was there to explain the strange fascination of those pages? Assuredly it was not due to their literary qualities, for these at first reading were singularly unattractive. Ornament, wealth of illustration, rhetorical devices of any sort or kind, there were none. A patient and persistent reader became gradually conscious of condensed thought expressed in language almost wholly free from technical terms; but, on the other hand, it was abstract in the extreme, and the reader felt that the transition to the concrete was left to be effected by special efforts. But what was new, what was profoundly impressive, what marked the teaching from that of other philosophic or religious treatises, was the combination established, in ways consistent with modern thought, between Sympathy and Synthesis. Nothing of the kind had been attempted before; and, amid all that has been written on the subject since, it still seems to me to stand alone. Observe that I...