’Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.’—­Prologue to Henry V.

[24] Seneca says of virtue, ’Non quia delectat placet, sed quia placet delectat.’  Of vice in the same way we may say, ’Non quia delectat pudet, sed quia pudet delectat.’

[25] It will be of course recollected that in this abstraction of the moral sense, we have to abstract it from the characters as well as ourselves.

[26] ’When I attempt to give the power which I see manifested in the universe an objective form, personal or otherwise, it slips away from me, declining all intellectual manipulation.  I dare not, save poetically, use the pronoun “He” regarding it.  I dare not call it a “Mind.” I refuse even to call it a “Cause.” Its mystery overshadows me; but it remains a mystery, while the objective frames which my neighbours try to make it fit, simply distort and desecrate it.’—­Dr. Tyndall, ‘Materialism and its Opponents.’

CHAPTER VII.

THE SUPERSTITION OF POSITIVISM.

Glendower. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur. Why so can I, or so can any man,
         But will they come when you do call for them?
                                          Henry IV.  Part 1.

General and indefinite as the foregoing considerations have been, they are quite definite enough to be of the utmost practical import.  They are definite enough to show the utter hollowness of that vague faith in progress, and the glorious prospects that lie before humanity, on which the positive school at present so much rely, and about which so much is said.  To a certain extent, indeed, a faith in progress is perfectly rational and well grounded.  There are many imperfections in life, which the course of events tends manifestly to lessen if not to do away with, and so far as these are concerned, improvements may go on indefinitely.  But the things that this progress touches are, as has been said before, not happiness, but the negative conditions of it.  A belief in this kind of progress is not peculiar to positivism.  It is common to all educated men, no matter what their creed may be.  What is peculiar to positivism is the strange corollary to this belief, that man’s subjective powers of happiness will go on expanding likewise.  It is the belief not only that the existing pleasures will become more diffused, but that they will, as George Eliot says, become ‘more intense in diffusion.’  It is this belief on which the positivists rely to create that enthusiasm, that impassioned benevolence, which is to be the motive power of their whole ethical machinery.  They have taken away the Christian heaven, and have thus turned adrift a number of hopes and aspirations that were once powerful.  These hopes and aspirations they acknowledge to be of the first necessity; they are facts, they say, of human nature, and no higher progress would be possible without them.  What the enlightened thought is to do is not to extinguish, but to transfer them.  They are to be given a new object more satisfactory than the old one; not our own private glory in another world, but the common glory of our whole race in this.