“The Church of Humanity”: New York's Worshipping Positivists

1991 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 508-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillis J. Harp
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Church

The philosophy of Auguste Comte changed irrevocably the intellectual contours of nineteenth-century Europe. In the Anglo-American world, John Stuart Mill was profoundly influenced by Comte's magisterial Cours de philosophie positive (1830–1842) and Mill's work became an important conduit through which Americans such as John Fiske, Lester F. Ward and Henry Adams encountered positivism. Comte's controversial later work (especially the Systéme de politique positive [1851–1854]) was also significant, although Mill and others became harsh critics of the so-called ‘second system.’ English admirers of Comte's bizarre social and religious blueprint did include notables, however, such as Frederic Harrison, Harriet Martineau and novelist George Eliot1.

A ‘LESS THAN ENTHUSIASTIC’ FRIENDSHIP: JOHN MORLEY, GEORGE ELIOT, AND GEORGE HENRY LEWES

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin A Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Middle Age ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Philosophy ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

Abstract For roughly a decade, John Morley enjoyed a warm and deferential sociality with George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. The basis for their friendship was the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, which initially held great appeal to Morley, who had lost his religious faith while studying as an undergraduate at Balliol, Oxford. While Lewes and Eliot’s views on Comte were largely fixed by middle age, Morley, still in his twenties, was searching for a substitute belief system. As Morley began to embrace the liberal philosophy of (and form a friendship with) John Stuart Mill, who had declared himself to be an antagonist of Comte’s, Morley, Lewes, and Eliot increasingly held less in common. This lack of commonality gave Morley the critical distance to reassess the couple both personally and intellectually. Embracing a new philosophy and divergent aesthetic preferences, Morley developed an equivocal view of his friends, roughly two decades his senior. Utilizing letters, diary entries, published writings, and a previously untranslated document in French, this essay provides a complex portrait of an intergenerational friendship among three nineteenth-century intellectuals.

scholarly journals JOHN STUART MILL, VICTORIAN LIBERALISM, AND THE FAILURE OF CO-OPERATIVE PRODUCTION

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOCELYN PAUL BETTS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Profit Sharing ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
Construction Of Knowledge ◽  
Historical Perspectives ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Valid Form

ABSTRACTJohn Stuart Mill's support for, and predictions of, co-operative production have been taken as a coherent wedding of liberal and socialist concerns, and as drawing together later nineteenth-century political economy and working-class radicalism. Despite its evident significance, the alliance of political economy and co-operative production was, however, highly conflicted, contested, and short-lived, in ways that help to shed light on the construction of knowledge of society in nineteenth-century Britain. Mill's vision should be seen as developed in contrast to the sociological and historical perspectives of Auguste Comte and Thomas Carlyle, as an attempt to hold together political economy as a valid form of knowledge with the hope of a new social stage in which commerce would be imbued with public spirit. This ideal thus involved debate about competing social futures and the tools of prediction, as well as entering debates within political economy where it was equally embattled. Even Mill's own economic logic tended more towards support of profit-sharing than co-operative production, and hopes for the latter became significantly less persuasive with the introduction of the concept of the entrepreneur into mainstream British economics during the 1870s and 1880s.

The Long Peace of the Nineteenth Century and the Birth of Sociology

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Jeremy Bentham ◽  
Research Programs ◽  
Herbert Spencer ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Liberal Thought

This chapter examines how the progressive optimism nourished by liberal doctrines gradually began to take hold and how sociology as a discipline took a particularly wide variety of institutional forms and featured very different theoretical and research programs. Toward the end of the eighteenth and during the first third of the nineteenth centuries, utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and later James and John Stuart Mill were already singing the praises of free trade and its peace-promoting effects. This laid the foundations for at least one strand of liberal thought in the nineteenth century, on which early “sociologists” such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer could then build. Despite the hegemonic status of liberal doctrines, other views were always present beneath the surface. This includes Marxism, which in many respects embraced the legacy of liberalism.

scholarly journals Elements of positivism in the Ukrainian philosophy and culture of the second half of the 19th century

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 269-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vyacheslav Artyukh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
The 19Th Century

This article addresses the appropriation of positivist thought by Ukrainian intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century, in particular in the field of philosophy of history. By discussing elements of positivist thought in the works of Mykhailo Drahomanov, Ivan Franko and Pantaleimon Kulish, the author argues that all three were under direct influence of positivist thought, but none of them was a blind adherent of positivism. Positivism particularly influenced their thinking about history and the issue of determinism. Importantly, it was not the French positivism of Auguste Comte whose ideas were adopted, but rather the English positivism of Henry Thomas Buckle and John Stuart Mill.

Comte, Mill, and the Thought of Nishi Amane in Meiji Japan

1968 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas R. H. Havens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
Abstract Reasoning ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
Meiji Restoration ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
Modes Of Thought

One aspect of the intellectual upheaval which accompanied the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was the phenomenon of bummei kaika, “civilization and enlightenment.” Although it may be useful to think of the early Meiji years as a Japanese siècle de lumières, it is significant that the country's most progressive scholars derived their main inspiration from such contemporaneous Western social philosophies as positivism and utilitarianism, not the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century. It is natural that the proponents of bummei kaika turned for guidance to John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte rather than Diderot or Rousseau, because their goal was to expose Japan to those urbane modes of thought from abroad which would bring her to the “civilized” stage of development envisaged by European social philosophy. The means to be employed consisted of empiricism, not abstract reasoning: “what we should call the truly enlightened world,” wrote Tsuda Mamichi in 1874, “is when practical studies become popular in our country and each person attains an understanding of truth.” Similarly, Fukuzawa Yukichi took nineteenth century England, not eighteenth century France, as the model for Japan's efforts to achieve “enlightenment.”

Breaking Out: The English Assimilation of Continental Thought in Nineteenth-Century Rome

1984 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Robert O. Preyer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
Temporal Dimension ◽  
Fluid Medium ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
The Past ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Continental Thought ◽  
Anglo American

Rome was central to the Anglo-American imagination; for Isabel Archer “in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective.… Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater.” James here records (in the preterit tense) an occurrence which can be recovered from the past definite and replicated in the present and future progressive tenses – Isabel needs only to position herself before the “large Roman record” and the experience of soothing Time, Time as continuum, becomes a possibility once again. This replicable consciousness may be further specified “how it feels when one is in the happening of experiencing Time as the fluid medium of all lived experience.” Rome occasions the consciousness of an alternative time sense, one which might lighten the burden of living within a deterministic temporal dimension where past actions condition present and future actions to such an extent that one feels hopelessly locked into an imprisoning narrative pattern of before and after, cause and effect. James obviously believed that such temporal epiphanies offered root room for the psyche, a possibility of returning to the actual with renewed or composed psychic energies. (Other interpretations were, of course, possible-the complacent and self-satisfied traveller was often troubled by this extension of consciousness.) However interpreted, one finds this shock of recognition everywhere – in Canto 4 of Childe Harold, in The Education of Henry Adams, in Middlemarch and Romola, The Marble Faun, in the verse of all the major poets from Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley through both Brownings, Rogers, and Tennyson, in The Stones of Venice, Dipsychus, Amours de Voyage, and dimly in Rienzi and The Last Days of Pompeii, not to mention Harriet Beecher Stowe's less-than-immortal Agnes of Sorrento.

The Township, the Pregnant Girl and the Church: Community Dynamics, Gender and Social Control in Early Nineteenth-century Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-67
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Community Dynamics ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Community ◽  
The Church ◽  
Unmarried Girl

In 1814 in a small Highland township an unmarried girl, ostracised by her neighbours, gave birth. The baby died. The legal precognition permits a forensic, gendered examination of the internal dynamics of rural communities and how they responded to threats to social cohesion. In the Scottish ‘parish state’ disciplining sexual offences was a matter for church discipline. This case is situated in the early nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd where and when church institutions were less powerful than in the post-Reformation Lowlands, the focus of most previous research. The article shows that the formal social control of kirk discipline was only part of a complex of behavioural controls, most of which were deployed within and by communities. Indeed, Scottish communities and churches were deeply entwined in terms of personnel; shared sexual prohibitions; and in the use of shaming as a primary method of social control. While there was something of a ‘female community’, this was not unconditionally supportive of all women nor was it ranged against men or patriarchal structures.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

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