Although Paris had a strong hold on Mary Putnam Jacobi, New York had much to offer, for Manhattan was becoming the nucleus of American intellectual life. It was the center of American literary culture as well as the publishing capital, due in part to George Putnam's contributions in the previous decades. New York was the locale of a growing academic community, led by the expansion of the city's universities. And it was a medical mecca due to its growing hospitals, medical societies, and public health movements after the Civil War. New York City was also becoming a prominent urban center of American women's rights activism, a movement that started in Seneca Falls in 1848. After belonging to such vibrant intellectual circles in Paris, Jacobi sought out like-minded intellectuals and professionals in New York, and did not need to look far.
Shortly after her arrival, Jacobi became involved in the New York Positivist Society, a loose-knit group of the city's intelligentsia dedicated to the ideas of August Comte. At biweekly meetings, middle- and upper-class writers, artists, and professionals met in parlors or lecture rooms to philosophize about the problems that plagued modern industrial society and to construct programs of social reform. These American disciples of Comte focused on two key positivist principles. First, they believed that all knowledge should be based on observable phenomena derived from empirical, scientific investigation. As David G. Croly, head of the New York Positivist Society, put it, "Our faith is ... based upon demonstrated truths, not upon authority or tradition, or mere subjective conceptions, but upon objective realities which can be seen and known of all men." Rejecting the atheist label, positivists insisted, "Our Supreme Being is Humanity, which we affirm is the only God man ever could or ever can know. " Second, they viewed society as an organism that mirrored both the family structure and the human body with its interrelated and interdependent parts. In the positivist view, all members and sectors of society, like all parts of an organism, should work in concert for the broader good. The philosophy translated neatly into middle-class visions of social reform in the post-Civil War era, for positivists believed professionals could eradicate social problems, and a new moral order would emerge where citizens worshipped humanity and directed their spirituality toward social improvement.
-Carla Bittel, Mary Putnam Jacobi & The Politics of Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America.
