heap’d o’er her head.  Philosophy, that lean’d on heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

Physic of metaphysic begs defence, And metaphysic calls for aid on sense!  See mystery to mathematics fly.  In vain:  they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.  Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires; And, unawares, morality expires.  Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine, Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine.  Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restor’d, Light dies before thy uncreating word, Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all.

Dr. Johnson said that these verses were the noblest in English poetry.  Could he have read them in our day, and have realised with what a pitiful accuracy their prophecy might soon begin to fulfil itself, he would probably have been too busy with dissatisfaction at the matter of it to have any time to spare for an artistic approbation of the manner.

FOOTNOTES: 

[27] Mr. Frederic Harrison.

[28] The case of J.S.  Mill may seem at first sight to be an exception to this.  But it is really not so.  Though he was brought up without any religious teaching, yet the severe and earnest influences of his childhood would have been impossible except in a religious country.  He was in fact brought up in an atmosphere (if I may borrow with a slight change a phrase of Professor Huxley’s) of Puritanism minus Christianity.  It may be remembered farther that Mill says of himself, ’I am one of the very few examples of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it.’

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PRACTICAL PROSPECT.

    Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck.... 
    Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell.

    Shakespeare, Sonnet XIV.

The prospects I have been just describing as the goal of positive progress will seem, no doubt, to many to be quite impossible in its cheerlessness.  If the future glory of our race was a dream, not worth dwelling on, much more so, they will say, is such a future abasement of it as this.  They will say that optimism may at times have perhaps been over-sanguine, but that this was simply the exuberance of health; whereas pessimism is, in its very nature, the gloom and languor of a disease.

Now with much of this view of the matter I entirely agree.  I admit that the prospect I have described may be an impossible one; personally, I believe it is so.  I admit also that pessimism is the consciousness of disease, confessing itself.  But the significance of these admissions is the very opposite of what it is commonly supposed to be.  They do not make the pessimism I have been arguing one whit less worthy of attention; on the contrary, they make it more worthy.  This is the point on which I may most readily be misunderstood.  I will therefore try to make my meaning as clear as possible.