Influence
Davies argues that Comte's austere and "slightly dispiriting" philosophy of humanity - viewed as alone in an indifferent universe (which can only be explained by "positive" science) and with nowhere to turn but to each other - "was even more influential in Victorian England than the theories of Charles Darwin or Karl Marx".
The system was ultimately unsuccessful but, along with Darwin's On the Origin of Species, it influenced the proliferation of various Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century, especially through the work of secularists such as George Holyoake and Richard Congreve. Although Comte's English followers, including George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, for the most part rejected the full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked the idea of a religion of humanity and his injunction to "vivre pour altrui" ("live for others", from which comes the word "altruism").
Read more about this topic: Religion Of Humanity
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“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”
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