Briefly, then, the positive school of to-day we see thus far to be in this position.  It has to make demands upon human life that were never made before; and human life is, in many ways, less able than it ever was to answer to them.

But this is not all.  There is a third matter yet left to consider—­a third factor in the case, peculiar to the present crisis.  That is the intense self-consciousness that is now developed in the world, and which is something altogether new to it.  During the last few generations man has been curiously changing.  Much of his old spontaneity of action has gone from him.  He has become a creature looking before and after; and his native hue of resolution has been sickled over by thought.  We admit nothing now without question; we have learnt to take to pieces all motives to actions.  We not only know more than we have done before, but we are perpetually chewing the cud of our knowledge.  Thus positive thought reduces all religions to ideals created by man; and as such, not only admits that they have had vast influence, but teaches us also that we in the future must construct new ideals for ourselves.  Only there will be this difference.  We shall now know that they are ideals, we shall no longer mistake them for objective facts.  But our positive thinkers forget this.  They forget that the ideals that were once active in the world were active amongst people who thought that they were more than ideals, and who very certainly did mistake them for facts; and they forget how different their position will be, as soon as their true nature is recognised.  There is no example, so far as I know, to be found in all history, of men having been stimulated or affected in any important way—­none, at any rate, of their having been restrained or curbed—­by a mere ideal that was known to have no reality to correspond to it.  A child is frightened when its nurse tells it that a black man will come down the chimney and take it away.  The black man, it is true, is only an ideal; and yet the child is affected.  But it would cease to be affected the instant it knew this.

As we go on with our enquiry these considerations will become plainer to us.  But enough has even now been said to show how distinct the present position is from any that have gone before it, and how little the experience of the past is really fitted to reassure us.  Greek and Roman thought was positive, in our sense of the word, only in a very small degree.  The thought of the other ancient empires was not positive at all.  The oldest civilisation of which any record is left to us—­the civilisation of Egypt—­was based on a theism which, of all other theisms, most nearly approaches ours.  And the doctrine of a future life was first learnt by the Jews from their masters during the Captivity.  We search utterly in vain through history for any parallel to our own negations.