might well instruct the world, though he knew little of its ways and passions; for the aim of his teaching was to withdraw men from the world.  But the aim of the positive moralist is precisely opposite; it is to keep men in the world.  It is not to teach men to despise this life, but to adore it.  The positions of the two moralists are in fact the exact converses of each other.  For the divine, earth is an illusion, heaven a reality; for the positivist, earth is a reality, and heaven an illusion.  The former in his retirement studied intensely the world that he thought real, and he could do this the better for being not distracted by the other.  The positivists imitate the divine in neglecting what they think is an illusion; but they do not attempt to imitate him in studying what they think is the reality.  The consequence is, as I have just been pointing out, that the world they live in and to which alone their system could be applicable, is a world of their own creation, and its bloodless populations are all of them idola specus.

If we will but think all this calmly over, and try really to sympathise with the position of these poor enthusiasts, we shall soon see their system in its true light, and shall learn at once to realise and to excuse its fatuity.  We shall see that it either has no meaning whatever, or that its meaning is one that its authors have already repudiated, and only do not recognise now, because they have so inadequately re-expressed it.  We shall see that their system has no motive power at all in it, or that its motive power is simply the theistic faith they rejected, now tied up in a sack and left to flounder instead of walking upright.  We shall see that their system is either nothing, or that it is a mutilated reproduction of the very thing it professes to be superseding.  Once set it upon its own professed foundations, and the entire quasi-religious structure, with its visionary hopes, its impossible enthusiasms—­all its elaborate apparatus for enlarging the single life, and the generation that surrounds it, falls to earth instantly like a castle of cards.  We are left simply each of us with our own lives, and with the life about us, amplified indeed to a certain extent by sympathy, but to a certain extent only—­an extent whose limits we are quite familiar with from experience, and which positivism, if it tends to move them at all, can only narrow, and can by no possibility extend.  We are left with this life, changed only in one way.  It will have nothing added to it, but it will have much taken from it.  Everything will have gone that is at present keenest in it—­joys and miseries as well.  In this way positivism is indeed an engine of change, and may inaugurate if not complete a most momentous kind of progress.  That progress is the gradual de-religionizing of life, the slow sublimating out of it of its concrete theism—­the slow destruction of its whole moral civilisation.  And as this progress continues there will not only