catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the
naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from
the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses.
Bacon indeed had prized science for adding to the comforts of life, a
function still commemorated by positivists in their eloquent moments.
Habitually, however, when they utter the word progress it is, in their
mouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for change in that
direction which they conceive to be on the whole predominant. If they
combine with physical speculation some elements of morals, these are
usually purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued
(probably, alas! because to do so is a psychological law); but what
happiness consists in we gather only from casual observations or by
putting together their national prejudices and party saws.

[Sidenote: Positivism no positive ideal.]

The truth is that even this radical school, emancipated as it thinks
itself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Like
children escaped from school, they find their whole happiness in
freedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit
were required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If you
astonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further than
that there should be a great many people and that they should be all
alike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and
later they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They have
discarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied the ideal;
they have not perceived that those symbols stood for the Life of Reason
and gave fantastic and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, is
pure humanity; and they have thus remained entangled in the colossal
error that ideals are something adventitious and unmeaning, not having a