An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant
Kant · en
That it should, however, see ends in the
outer life and present world as ends fully sufficient in themselves,
that it should cease to set these in the light of the eternal, is that
it should cease to be religion. The physical and social sciences have
given to men an outward setting in the world, a basis of power and
happiness such as men never have enjoyed. Yet the tragic failure of our
civilisation to give to vast multitudes that power and happiness, is the
proof that something more than the outward basis is needed. The success
of our civilisation is its failure.
This is by no means a recurrence to the old antithesis of religion and
civilisation, as if these were contradictory elements. On the contrary,
it is but to show that the present world of religion and of economics
are not two worlds, but merely different aspects of the same world.
Therewith it is not alleged that religion has not a specific
contribution to make.
POSITIVISM
The permanent influence of that phase of thought which called itself
Positivism has not been great. But a school of thought which numbered
among its adherents such men and women as John Stuart Mill, George Henry
Lewes, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison, and Matthew Arnold, cannot be
said to have been without significance. A book upon the translation of
which Harriet Martinean worked with sustained enthusiasm cannot be
dismissed as if it were merely a curiosity. Comte's work, _Coura de
Philosophie Positive_, appeared between the years 1830 and 1842. Littré
was his chief French interpreter. But the history of the positivist
movement belongs to the history of English philosophical and religious
thought, rather than to that of France.