"Positivist" Quotes from Famous Books
... Religion of Humanity. [Footnote: An essay delivered at the Church Congress, Manchester, and printed in a pamphlet] In this essay he first dismisses the purely scientific and then goes on to discuss the Positivist view of man. The following passages will give some idea of his manner and style ... — Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... experimental work of Bottazzi, Morselli, and De Rochas all make for a spiritual interpretation of life rather than for the position of the materialist? I consider that they have strengthened rather than weakened the mystic side of the universe. They are bringing the wonder of the world back to the positivist. Let them go on. They will yet demonstrate, in spite of themselves, the immortality of ... — The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... who develops an undesirable interest in the Milliners' Club. Have they a Strangers' Room? Do they give suppers? Are they Friendly Girls? Everyone thinks GRIGSBY flippant and coarse; I wish I had not asked him to come. There is a Positivist, who sneers at the Clergyman; there are a Squire and his wife from Rutlandshire: she is next the Radical Candidate for the Isle of Dogs. They do not seem to get on well together. GRIGSBY and the humorist of the future are chaffing each other across the table: nobody understands ... — Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... 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 ... — Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... "I always adopt a little pleonasm myself to avoid Christian controversy, and say 'when So-and-so became' a Roman or Anglican Catholic, a Protestant, Positivist, or whatever else it might be; and I let them say 'convert' or 'pervert,' whichever they like, to me, because I know that it really cannot matter, so long as they are agreeable—not that anybody ever expects ... — The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 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
... inexhaustible kindness of heart and a capacity for innocent gaiety which owed nothing to humor. In an earlier day and with a clerical training he might have risen to the scarlet hat. He was, in fact, a highly regarded member of the London Positivist Society, a retired banker, a widower without children. His austere but not unhappy life was spent largely among books and in museums; his profound and patiently accumulated knowledge of a number of curiously disconnected ... — The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... thought to mention the matter. James Martineau was a great man, but if he had been just a little greater he would have taken a profound pride in a sister who was so sharp a shooter that she could puncture his balloon. James Martineau was a theologian; Harriet was a Positivist. But Positivity had a lure for him, and so there is a long review, penned largely with aqua fortis, on Miss Martineau's translation, done by her brother for the "Edinburgh Review," wherein Harriet is not ... — Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... deplorable carelessness of their biographers concerning the facts and influences of their youth. He advocates the great pedagogic influence of biography, and would restore the high appreciation of it felt by the Bolandists, which Comte's positivist calendar, that renamed all the days of the year from three hundred and sixty-five such accounts in 1849, also sought to revive. Yoder selected fifty great modern biographies, autobiographies preferred, for his study. He found a number ... — Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... about insoluble questions. Try to be more positive—I don't say become a Positivist. Keep a receptive mind, and wait for time to shape your views of things. I see that London has agitated and confused you; you have lost your bearings amid the maze of contradictory finger-posts. If you were here I could soothe you with Sylvian ... — Born in Exile • George Gissing
... we may point out what we conceive to be the significance, the implication of the facts just set forth. If we are to think about the matter at all, if we are not to adopt a Positivist attitude and absolutely bar metaphysic as a sterile and unprofitable investigation, it seems to me that the moral law, like all law, points unmistakably to reason as its source; and since, as already pointed out, man does not create the moral order in which he lives any more than ... — Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... that he was on terms of familiar correspondence with all the chief literary men of the day. With so conspicuous a reputation, he believed it necessary to do something in religion. So he gave up religion, and allowed it to be understood that he was a man of advanced views: a Positivist, a Buddhist, or something equally occult. Thus he became ripe for the highest employment, and was placed successively on a number of Special Commissions. He inquired into everything; he wrote hundredweights of reports; he proved himself to have the true paralytic ink flux, precisely the kind ... — Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... a barren-minded monad, called A positivist; and he knew positively: "There is no world beyond this certain drop. Prove me another! Let the dreamers dream Of their faint gleams, and noises from without, And higher and lower; life is life enough." Then ... — Practice Book • Leland Powers
... and honesty in every detail, saves her from this too common snare. But it does not and cannot save her in the work of selection, synthesis, and interpretation of instances, which has to be guided, not by objective facts, but by subjective opinions and impressions. History written in a purely positivist spirit, ad narrandum, and in no sense ad docendum, is a chimerical notion by which Renan beguiled himself into thinking that his Vie de Jesus was a bundle of facts and nothing more. And Mrs. Humphrey Ward is no less beguiled, if she is unaware that in threading together, classifying and ... — The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell |