"Positivist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... define. Universal good, beauty, order,—these he sees, feels, is sure of. What form belongs to them, let each imagine as best he can. So free, so generous, so simply true is he that not only men of an idealist way of thinking, but all strong and high souls own impulse from him,—the scientist, the positivist, the churchman. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... encompassing both these worlds a still wider world may be there, as unseen by us as our world is by him; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform. But "may be! may be!" one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; "what use can a scientific life have for maybes?" Well, I reply, the {59} 'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... faculty in man and the lord of all the rest. Grant this, as too often our controversial theology does grant it, and the battle is yielded before it is begun. Whether that rationalism leads to orthodox or heterodox conclusions, whether it issues in a Westminster Assembly's Confession of faith or a Positivist Primer is a matter of secondary importance. Religion is not a conclusion of the reason. The reason is not the lord of the spiritual domain. There is a world which it never sees and with which it is wholly incompetent to deal. And Christian faith wins its victories ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... of the Positivist philosophy, never felt the need of a religion until he had fallen in love; and at the present day his "faith" appears to consist in a worship of the great and wise and good among the dead. I have already spoken of many Gipsies reminding me, by their entirely unconscious ungodliness, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... German political idealism in which brother was supposed to shake hands with brother, sung by the poet Arndt, in his romantic semi-religious lyrics of liberty, was through the recent German revolution (1848) replaced by a new type of positivist German, intent on money-success, business affairs, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... The sceptic, to be at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent. Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer novelty, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... as part of collective humanity, and that he does not live for himself, he has no continuance of personal life, he has no permanence, except as a living influence on the Race. This is the Positivist creed, the Racial Creed. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... Czech deputies stood in opposition against Vienna with the exception of Kramr, who tried to imitate the Polish positivist policy in the hope of obtaining concessions in return. But, as we have already shown in a previous chapter, Dr. Kramr abandoned this policy even before the war, when he saw how completely Austria was ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... anticipations, is one of the most unlikely things possible. This, however, need not detract from the worth for our purpose of their exposition of the principles themselves. Again, the visible traces of the impression made by the writings of this school on the influential founder of the earliest Positivist system, are sufficiently deep and important to make some knowledge of them of the highest historical interest, both to those who accept and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley |
