ABSTRACT
The old positivism of Comte and Littré has been completely absorbed by the intellectual renaissance due to the master thinkers of whom we have been speaking; and no trace of it remains, saving some harmless cosmogonies fabricated by wholesale dealers in science, and not calling for our attention. Comte’s classification of the sciences—the main plank in the positivist platform—has been taken up and developed in a very different direction by the so-called New Spiritualism; and Boutroux, with his more speculative mind, has carried it to its logical conclusion. As for the religion which Comte invented, the French have always regarded it as a farce; and in fact it is simply the final effort of naturalism to counterfeit by an act of self-deification that spiritual inwardness which eludes its schemata.
