No philosophical movement of the nineteenth century engaged more fully the major intellectual preoccupations of the time, and few have been as influential down to the present moment as Positivism. Although Comte was not the only figure whose positivist ideas were disseminated in England, he was the thinker whose systematization of anti-metaphysical scientific knowledge provoked important Victorians like Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, G. H. Lewes and George Eliot to take up “positivism” as a serious philosophy. His ideas became focal points around which positivist programs (and hostility to those programs) constellated, and as Basil Willey claimed many years ago, “Comte is, in a sense, the century in epitome.” Twentieth-century positivism was quite a different thing, but many of the issues raised by Comte persist in positivism to this day, and looking at the Victorians' version can help focus some of the critical issues, particularly to do with the relation between fact and value, and the possibility of epistemology being an ethical enterprise (or at least tightly enwound with ethics).

To be sure, even at its height, the “Positivist Society” could count among its London members only ninety-three people. George Eliot, though she composed the Positivist hymn, “O May I Join the Choir Invisible,” and was a good friend of Positivists, most particularly Frederic Harrison, would not attend the Positivist Church. T. R. Wright reports the contemporary joke about the schism within the Positivist Society, that “they had come to Church in one cab and left in two.”