Note 24 — THE MONIST. (continued 4)

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.