Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885 — John Shaqi
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885Various
General
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
When we have them side by side, we shall have
before us a new measure of the sound, sympathetic, and universal spirit
of Positivist belief. It is only those who are strangers to it and to
us who can wonder how we come to put the Bible and the poets in equal
places of honor as alike the great organs of true religious feeling.
The systematic teaching of science, which is an essential part of
our conception of Positivism, has been maintained in this hall with
unabated energy. In the beginning of the year Mr. Vernon Lushington
commenced and carried through (with what an effort of personal
self-devotion no one of us can duly measure) his class on the history
and the elements of Astronomy. This winter, Mr. Lock has opened a
similar class on the History and Elements of Mathematics. Positivism is
essentially a scheme for reforming education, and it is only through
a reformed education, universal to all classes alike, and concerned
with the heart as much as the intellect, that the religious meaning of
Humanity can ever be unfolded. The singing class, the expense of which
was again assumed by Mr. Lushington, was steadily and successfully
maintained during the first part of the year. We are still looking
forward to the formation of a choir. The social meetings which we
instituted last year have become a regular feature of our movement, and
greatly contribute to our closer union and our better understanding of
the social and sympathetic meaning of the faith we profess.
The publications of the year have been first and chiefly, _The
Testament and Letters of Auguste Comte_, a work long looked for, the
publication of which has been long delayed by various causes. In the
next place I would call attention to the new and popular edition of
_International Policy_, a work of combined essays which we put forward
in 1866, nearly twenty years ago. Our object in that work was to state
and apply to the leading international problems in turn the great
principles of social morality on which it is the mission of Positivism
to show that the politics of nations can only securely repose. In an
epoch which is still tending, we are daily assured, to the old passion
for national self-assertion, it is significant that the Positivist
school alone can resolutely maintain and fearlessly repeat its dictates
of morality and justice, whilst all the Churches, all the political
parties, and all the so-called organs of opinion, which are really the
creatures of parties and cliques, find various pretexts for abandoning
them altogether. How few are the political schools around us who could
venture to republish after twenty years, _their_ political programmes
of 1866, _their_ political doctrines and practical solutions of the
tangled international problems, and who could not find in 1885 a
principle which they had discarded, or a proposal which to-day they are
ashamed to have made twenty years ago.
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