Thus in the seas of life enisled,
      With echoing straits between us thrown,
    Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
      We mortal myriads live alone.

So says Mr. Matthew Arnold; and the gentle Keble utters the same sentiment, remarking, with a delicate pathos, how seldom those even who have known us best and longest

    Know half the reason why we smile or sigh.

Thus in the recesses of his own soul each man is, for the positivist, as much alone as if he were the only conscious thing in the universe; and his whole inner life, when he dies, will, to use some words of George Eliot’s that I have already quoted,

    Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb,
    Unread for ever.

No one shall enquire into his inward thoughts, much less shall anyone judge him for them.  To no one except himself can he in any way have to answer for them.

Such is the condition of the individual according to the positivist theory.  It is evident, therefore, that one of the first results of positivism is to destroy even the rudiments of any machinery by which one man could govern, with authority, the inward kingdom of another; and the moral imperative is reduced to an empty vaunt.  For what can be an emptier flourish than for one set of men, and these a confessed minority, to proclaim imperious laws to others, which they can never get the others to obey, and which are essentially meaningless to the only people to whom they are not superfluous?  Suppose that, on positive grounds, I find pleasure in humility, and my friend finds pleasure in pride, and so far as we can form a judgment the happiness of us both is equal; what possible grounds can I have for calling my state better than his?  Were I a theist, I should have the best of grounds, for I should believe that hereafter my friend’s present contentment would be dissipated, and would give place to despair.  But as a positivist, if his contentment do but last his lifetime, what can I say except this, that he has chosen what, for him, was his better part for ever, and no God or man will ever take it away from him?  To say then that his immoral state was worse than my moral state would be a phrase incapable of any practical meaning.  It might mean that, could my friend be made to think as I do, he would be happier than he is at present; but we have here an impossible hypothesis, and an unverifiable conclusion.  It is true enough that I might present to my friend some image of my own inward state, and of all the happiness it gave me; but if, having compared his happiness and mine as well as he could, he still liked his own best, exhortation would have no power, and reproach no meaning.

Here, then, are three results—­simple, immediate, and necessary—­of positivism, on the moral end.  Of the three characteristics at present supposed essential to it, positivism eliminates two and materially modifies the third.