[22] ... “A represénter le positivisme comme directement résummé par
l’utopie de la Vierge-Mère”—Comte to Audiffrent, the 8th of St. Paul 69
(May 28, 1857.)
[23] Good philosophers, it is true, are rare in America, perhaps rarer
than in Europe. Nevertheless the interest in philosophy is exceedingly
strong here. There are metaphysical and philosophical clubs all over the
country, and the crop of philosophical dilettanti is at least as great on
this side of the Atlantic as in Paris.
[24] It is a matter of course that we are in strong sympathy with many
philosophers and scientists whom Hermann Gruber classes among the
positivists outside of the positivistic schools, not only Th. Ribot, but
also Guyau, Fouillée, Roberty, and others. How much they were influenced
by the Comte-Littré or the Comte-Lafitte Positivism is difficult to say.
It is certain that many of them would have accomplished the same work in
the same way with or without Comte. Roberty was first a fervid disciple
of Comte, but he soon combated not only Comte’s law of the three stages
(which latter by the bye was according to Schaarschmidt first pronounced
by Turgot) but also his agnosticism, declaring that Comte was still
entangled in metaphysicism, and that the last bulwark, the idea of the
unknowable, had to be conquered also.
[25] We publish in this number a sonnet by Louis Belrose, Jr. to Émile
Littré. Mr. Belrose is a positivist who attended together with Mr. Fred.
Harrison positivistic lectures in France. We publish Mr. Belrose’s poem
as an expression of his gratitude and admiration toward a master mind but
not as an expression of our view of Littré.