ABSTRACT
Une religion sans Dieu! Mon Dieu, quelle religion! So, wittily enough, according to a disappointed advocate of the Religion of Humanity inaugurated by Auguste Comte, did the French public of fifty years or so ago respond to the challenge of that system of worship—little in evidence nowadays—wherein the attempt was made to accommodate the traditional piety of Catholic France to the framework of an atheistic philosophy based upon natural science. It is true that Positivism, as an organized religion, cannot be said to have succeeded in replacing or even in effectively competing with those older creeds which do not pretend to confine their attention to what the Positivists called “phenomena.” Nevertheless, it may be fairly regarded as the pioneer of a movement which is very much in evidence among us at the present time, and which has made the phrase Une religion sans Dieu sound less absurd and paradoxical in the ears of a considerable number of thoughtful people than it presumably did to the generality of those to whom the disciples of Comte addressed themselves in the second half of the nineteenth century.
