a spontaneous feeling connects such a sense somehow with our deepest moral being.  But this, on positive principles, must be feeling only.  It means absolutely nothing:  it can have no objective fact that corresponds to it.  It is an illusion, a pathetic fallacy.  And to say that the heavens with their stars declare to us anything high or holy, is no more rational than to say that Brighton does, which itself, seen at night from the sea, is a long braid of stars descended upon the wide horizon.  All that the study of nature, all that the love of truth, can do for the positivist is not to guide him to any communion with a vaster power, but to show him that no such communion is possible.  His devotion to truth, if it mean anything—­and the language he often uses about it betrays this—­let us know the worst, not let us find out the best:—­a wish which is neither more nor less noble than the wish to sit down at once in a slop upon the floor rather than sustain oneself any longer above it on a chair that is discovered to be rickety.

Here then again, in this last resource of positivism we have religion embodied as a yet more important element than in any of the others; and when this element is driven out of it, it collapses yet more hopelessly than they do.  By the whole positive system we are bound to human life.  There is no mystical machinery by which we can rise above it.  It is by its own isolated worth that this life must stand or fall.

And what, let us again ask, will this worth, be?  The question is of course, as I have said, too vague to admit of more than a general answer, but a general answer, as I have said also, may be given confidently enough.  Man when fully imbued with the positive view of himself, will inevitably be an animal of far fewer capacities than he at present is.  He will not be able to suffer so much; but also he will not be able to enjoy so much.  Surround him, in imagination, with the most favourable circumstances; let social progress have been carried to the utmost perfection; and let him have access to every happiness of which we can conceive him capable.  It is impossible even thus to conceive of life as a very valuable possession to him.  It would at any rate be far less valuable than it is to many men now, under outer circumstances that are far less favourable.  The goal to which a purely human progress is capable of conducting us, is thus no vague condition of glory and felicity, in which men shall develop new and ampler powers.  It is a condition in which, the keenest life attainable has continually been far surpassed already, without anything having been arrived at that in itself seemed of surpassing value.

FOOTNOTES: 

[23] ’Hippolyta.—­This is the silliest stuff I ever heard. Theseus.—­The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no worse, if imagination amend them. Hippolyta.—­It must be your imagination then, not theirs.’—­Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Act V.