and intelligence enough to know that it is insignificant.  We survey the past and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations.  We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude.  Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish.  The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the Universe, will be at rest.  Matter will know itself no longer.  Imperishable monuments and immortal deeds, death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as though they had never been.  Nor will anything that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless generations to effect.

He continues on Positivism as an influence that cannot be disregarded: 

One of the objects of the “religion of humanity,” and it is an object beyond all praise, is to stimulate the imagination till it lovingly embraces the remotest fortunes of the whole human family.  But in proportion as this end is successfully attained, in proportion as we are taught by this or any other religion to neglect the transient and the personal, and to count ourselves as labourers for that which is universal and abiding, so surely must be the increasing range which science is giving to our vision over the time and spaces of the material universe, and the decreasing importance of the place which man is seen to occupy in it, strike coldly on our moral imagination, if so be that the material universe is all we have to do with.  My contention is that every such religion and every such philosophy, so long as it insists on regarding man as merely a phenomenon among phenomena, a natural object among other natural objects, is condemned by science to failure as an effective stimulus to high endeavour.  Love, pity, and endurance it may indeed leave with us; and this is well.  But it so dwarfs and impoverishes the ideal end of human effort, that though it may encourage us to die with dignity, it hardly permits us to live with hope.

Apart from the unvarying love I have always had for Arthur Balfour, I should be untrue to myself if I did not feel deeply grateful for the unchanging friendship of a man who can think and write like this.

Of the other two Prime Ministers I cannot write, though no one knows them better than I do.  By no device of mine could I conceal my feelings; both their names will live with lustre, without my conscience being chargeable with frigid impartiality or fervent partisanship, and no one will deny that all of us should be allowed some “private property in thought.”