John Mill had in 1865 sworn "on the true faith of a Christian," and a good many Agnostics and Positivists have since unmurmuringly invoked the unknown God.
In this does the fundamental difference between the Christian teaching and the teaching of the positivists and of all the theorists of the non-Christian universal brotherhood consist.
The leader of the English positivistsis Frederic Harrison (born 1831).
A small drawing-room would assuredly hold all the London Positivists who make themselves effective in English politics.
If we mean merely a believer in the philosophical theory of history, then Positivists are, indeed, to be named as legion, and their captains are among the greatest intellects of the world to-day.
Whatever way average opinion tends, the influence of the Positivists is sure to tend the other way.
The Positivists are all, indeed, un-English, in the common use of a phrase which is ceasing of late to be so dreaded a stigma as it once used to be in British politics.
Some three or four years ago the Positivists published a large and ponderous volume of essays on subjects of international policy.
The Positivists are almost always to be found in antagonism with this sort of public opinion.
But of all the sickening humbugs in the world, the sham pietism of the Positivists is to me the most offensive.
Pyrrho in ancient times, and Hume in modern, represent the former; the Positivists of modern times, and perhaps the Sophists of the fifth century B.
This is the question at issue between modern Positivists and their opponents.
Mystics honoured the post-rational motive and despised the pre-rational; positivists clung to the second and hated the first.
Bacon indeed had prized science for adding to the comforts of life, a function still commemorated by positivists in their eloquent moments.
The proper procedure in refuting these incomplete positivists is not to appeal to some dogma or outer authority but rather to turn against them their own principles.
Of course, we positivists know very well, that the material requirements of life shape and determine also the moral and intellectual aims of human consciousness.
And thus, from the habit of calling them Positivists there has grown up the assumption that they call themselves Positivists, and that they are the disciples of Comte.
If they are Positivists it is in the sense that all men of science have been more or less consistently Positivists; and the applicability of M.
The most notable difference is that the metaphysical and historical jurists rely chiefly on primitive occupation of ownerless things, while the positivists have been inclined to lay stress upon creation of new things by labor.
If the Agnostics and Positivists triumph, it will be transformed, not abolished.
His constant criticism upon positivists and agnostics is that their creeds afford no satisfactory sanction.
The positivists were beginning to make themselves known, and, for various reasons, were anything but attractive to him.
Religions which cannot threaten the selfish have no power at all; and till the positivists can threaten, they will remain a mere 'Ritualistic Social Science Association.
We cannot as Catholics, as Christians, make the concession to the Positivists the Presbyterian doctor does, that their science is an authority independent of religion, and not amenable to it.
The Positivists reject for what they call the scientific age both theology and metaphysics.
We may assert and prove miracles as a fact, but the objections of Positivists to them cannot be scientifically answered till we have proved that they have their law in the supernatural order.
Then we complain of the author for the indignity he offers to Christianity by suffering the Positivists to put it on the defensive, and in attempting to prove it against positivism.
This proves that a designer cannot be inferred from the simple facts observed in nature, as the Positivists maintain.
The Positivistsnever calumniate the past, but seek to appreciate its services to humanity, to acknowledge the good it did, and to bury it with honor, as the children of the New Dispensation did the Old, when it had lived its day.
Indeed, all the avowed Positivists we have known regard Protestant Christianity as too insignificant a matter to be counted.
He is too near of kin to the Positivists themselves, and adopts too 10 many of their principles and conclusions, to be able to battle effectively against them.
But positivists are those who try to find the unrelated in the ward of a city.
At present we have not the delusions of Absolutism that may have translated some of the positivists of the nineteenth century to heaven.
It's been interesting to me to go over various long-established periodicals and note controversies between attempting positivists and then intermediatistic issues.
The Positivists understand very well the anarchy that reigns in the modern intellectual world, and the need of a doctrine which can unite in one all the scattered and broken rays of intelligence and command the adhesion of all minds.
For the positivists have become, through practice, so well conversant with the phraseology peculiar to this theme, that they are now capable of masterpieces of wit and eloquence.
After animadverting thus severely on this ascription of phenomena, it was not to be expected that these positivists would be guilty of the inconsistency of advocating a theory the basis of which was one of these "metaphysical entities.
The truth is, that these "metaphysical entities" are in almost as frequent use among positivists as among their adversaries.
When, for example, the Italian positivists repeatedly assert that woman is less erotic and more sexual, they mean that man cares more about the satisfaction of the sexual impulse, woman about the maternal instinct.
Of course there are badly behaved children, and it is no agreement with the Italian positivists to add, also, that a large number of criminals were good for nothing even in their earliest youth.
The Positivists have great faith in the historic method of analogy, and they are right in so doing.
On Sunday the 28th he was received by the New York Positivists and welcomed in extremely kind terms by the President of the Society.
The Positivists pretend that this asceticism is itself a natural development, but that cannot be a natural development which directs, controls, and restrains natural development.
There is deep philosophy in Christian asceticism, as the Positivists themselves are aware, and even insist.
The Positivists confound nature at one time with the law of nature, and at another the law of nature with nature herself, and take what is called the natural law to be a natural development.
The Christians may, with far more force, ask the positivists how they expect to enjoy themselves on earth.
Indeed, for the positivists to talk about communion or association with Nature is about as rational as to talk about communion or association with a steam-engine.
It is this belief on which thepositivists rely to create that enthusiasm, that impassioned benevolence, which is to be the motive power of their whole ethical machinery.
The positivists do not postulate any new elements in human nature, but the reduction of some, elimination of others, and the magnifying of others.
Much more shall we see it yielded up by heroism, by purity, by affection, and by love of truth--by all those things that the positivists most specially praise.
The positivists and the unbelievers of the modern world, are not the same as those of the ancient world.
But what thepositivists themselves learn from it, is something very different.
The positivistswould probably tell us that they do not do so, or that they do not mean to do so.
The positivists have bound themselves to admit that theirs is nothing unless describable.
By what conceivable means, then, can thepositivists transfer to Nature in general qualities which, so far as they know, are peculiar to human nature only?
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "positivists" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
