Italian Positivism

In Italy, Positivism was accepted as a method of procedure for scientific inquiry and for the solution of practical questions concerning social and individual life. Indeed, the appearance of Positivism in Italy coincides with the establishment of national unity; that is, it arrived when the time was ripe for the reorganization of economic, educational and social life on a national scale. For a solution to these problems it seemed opportune to have recourse to the positivist methodology of inquiry into the facts presented by experience. A peculiar aspect of Italian Positivism is its conflict with the Catholic Church, whose dogmas and institutions it sought to demolish in the name of positivist and materialistic science.

The exponent of Italian Positivism was Roberto Ardigo (1828-1920), who accepted the evolutionist principle of reality as a passage from the "indistinct to the distinct." According to Ardigo, the primordial "indistinct" condition of being is a psycho-physical reality revealing itself in the first event of consciousness, i.e., sensation. From the sensation follows the distinction of subject from object, of ego from non-ego.

Sensations are not psychical atoms, as Empiricist associationism held, but elements of a common rhythm, in which all things are united. Particular rhythms join with other particular rhythms in a more ample form, from which comes the order of nature. Such a theory of knowledge leads to agnosticism in metaphysics and to atheism in religion.