did, we must make pleasure as perilous and as terrible as it was under the Roman emperors.  Such developments of humanity are at their very essence abnormal; and to suppose that they could ever become the common type of character, would be as absurd as to suppose that all mankind could be kings.  I will take another instance that is more to the point yet.  A favourite positivist parable is that of the miser.  The miser in the first place desires gold because it can buy pleasure.  Next he comes to desire it more than the pleasure it can buy.  In the same way, it is said, men can be taught to desire virtue by investing it with the attractions of the end, to which, strictly speaking it is no more than the means.  But this parable really disproves the very possibility it is designed to illustrate.  It is designed to illustrate the possibility of our choosing actions that will give pleasure to others, in contradistinction to actions that will give pleasure to ourselves.  But the miser desires gold for an exactly opposite reason.  He desires it as potential selfishness, not as potential philanthropy.  Secondly, we are to choose the actions in question because they will make us happy.  But the very name we give the miser shows that the analogous choice in his case makes him miserable.  Thirdly, the material miser is an exceptional character; there is no known means by which it can be made more common; and with the moral miser the case will be just the same.  Lastly, if such a character be barely producible even in the present state of the world, much less will it be producible when human capacities shall have been curtailed by positivism, when the pleasures that the gold of virtue represents are less intense than at present, and the value of the coveted coin is indefinitely depreciated.

Much more might be added to the same purpose, but enough has been said already to make these two points clear:—­firstly, that the positive system, if it is to do any practical work in the world, requires that the whole human character shall be profoundly altered; and secondly, that the required alteration is one that may indeed be dreamt about, but which can never possibly be made.  Even were it made, the results would not be splendid; but no matter how splendid they might be, this is of no possible moment to us.  There are few things on which it is idler to speculate than the issues of impossible contingencies.  And the positivists would be talking just as much to the purpose as they do now, were they to tell us how fast we should travel supposing we had wings, or what deep water we could wade through if we were twenty-four feet high.  These last, indeed, are just the suppositions that they do make.  Between our human nature and the nature they desiderate there is a deep and fordless river, over which they can throw no bridge, and all their talk supposes that we shall be able to fly or wade across it, or else that it will dry up of itself.

    Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille
    Labitur et labetur, in omne volubilis aevum.