unable to believe that this object is capable of gathering round it
feelings sufficiently strong: but this is exactly the point on which a
doubt can hardly remain in an intelligent reader of M. Comte: and we
join with him in contemning, as equally irrational and mean, the
conception of human nature as incapable of giving its love and devoting
its existence to any object which cannot afford in exchange an eternity
of personal enjoyment.

The power which may be acquired over the mind by the idea of the general
interest of the human race, both as a source of emotion and as a motive
to conduct, many have perceived; but we know not if any one, before M.
Comte, realized so fully as he has done, all the majesty of which that
idea is susceptible. It ascends into the unknown recesses of the past,
embraces the manifold present, and descends into the indefinite and
unforeseeable future, forming a collective Existence without assignable
beginning or end, it appeals to that feeling of the Infinite, which is
deeply rooted in human nature, and which seems necessary to the
imposingness of all our highest conceptions. Of the vast unrolling web
of human life, the part best known to us is irrevocably past; this we
can no longer serve, but can still love: it comprises for most of us the
far greater number of those who have loved us, or from whom we have
received benefits, as well as the long series of those who, by their
labours and sacrifices for mankind, have deserved to be held in
everlasting and grateful remembrance. As M. Comte truly says, the
highest minds, even now, live in thought with the great dead, far more
than with the living; and, next to the dead, with those ideal human
beings yet to come, whom they are never destined to see. If we honour as
we ought those who have served mankind in the past, we shall feel that
we are also working for those benefactors by serving that to which their
lives were devoted. And when reflection, guided by history, has taught