be distinctly less intense. It will, as we have
seen already, be but a vapid consummation at its best;
and the more vividly it is brought before us in imagination,
the less likely shall we be to ’
struggle,
groan, and agonize,’ for the sake of hastening
it in reality. It will do nothing, at any rate,
to increase the tendency to self-sacrifice that is
now at work in the world; and this, though startling
us now and then by some spasmodic manifestation, is
not strong enough to have much general effect on the
present; still less will it have more effect on the
future. Vicarious happiness as a rule is only
possible when the object gained for another is enormously
greater than the object lost by self; and it is not
always possible even then: whilst when the gains
on either side are nearly equal, it ceases altogether.
And necessarily so. If it did not, everything
would be at a dead-lock. Life would be a perpetual
holding back, instead of a pushing forward. Everyone
would be waiting at the door, and saying to everyone
else, ‘
After you.’ But all
these practical considerations are entirely forgotten
by the positivists. They live in a world of their
own imagining, in which all the rules of this world
are turned upside down. There, the defeated candidate
in an election would be radiant at his rival’s
victory. When a will was read, the anxiety of
each relative would be that he or she should be excluded
in favour of the others; or more probably still that
they should be all excluded in favour of a hospital.
Two rivals, in love with the same woman, would be
each anxious that his own suit might be thwarted.
And a man would gladly involve himself in any ludicrous
misfortune, because he knew that the sight of his
catastrophe would rejoice his whole circle of friends.
The course of human progress, in fact, would be one
gigantic donkey-race, in which those were the winners
who were farthest off from the prize.
We have but to state the matter in terms of common
life, to see how impossible is the only condition
of things that would make the positive system practicable.
The first wonder that suggests itself, is how so grotesque
a conception could ever have originated. But its
genesis is not far to seek. The positivists do
not postulate any new elements in human nature, but
the reduction of some, elimination of others, and the
magnifying of others. And they actually find cases
where this process has been effected. But they
quite forget the circumstances that have made such
an event possible. They forget that in their very
nature they have been altogether exceptional and transitory;
and that it is impossible to construct a Utopia in
which they shall exist at all. We can, for instance,
no doubt point to Leonidas and the three hundred as
specimens of what human heroism can rise to; and we
can point to the Stoics as specimens of human self-control.
But to make a new Thermopylae we want a new Barbarian;
and before we can recoil from temptation as the Stoics