Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry.... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry -- an aberration which is happily almost impossible -- it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science.

C'este donc par l'étude des mathématiques, et seulement par elle, que l'on peut se faire une idée juste et approfondie de ce que c'est qu'une science.

Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.