shall finish it. On this last belief it is plain that the pleasure does
depend, largely if not entirely; and it is precisely this last belief
that positivism takes away.

To return again, then, to the subject of human love--we are now in a
position to see that, as offered us at present by the positive school of
moralists, it cannot, properly speaking, be called a positive pleasure
at all, but that, it is still essentially a religious one; and that when
the religious element is eradicated, its entire character will change.
It may be, of course, contended that the religious element is
ineradicable: but this is simply either to call positivism an
impossibility, or religion an incurable disease. Here, however, we are
touching on a side issue, which I shall by and by return to, but which
is at present beside the point. My aim now is not to argue either that
positivism can or cannot be accepted by humanity, but to show what, if
accepted, it will have to offer us. I wish to point out the error, for
instance, of such writers as George Eliot, who, whilst denying the
existence of any sun-god in the heavens, are yet perpetually adoring the
sunlight on the earth; who profess to extinguish all fire on principle,
and then offer us boiling water to supply its place; or who, sending
love to us as a mere Cassandra, continue to quote as Scripture the
prophecies they have just discredited.

Thus far what we have seen is this. Love as a positive pleasure, if it
be ever reduced to such, will be a very different thing from what our
positivist moralists at present see it to be. It will perform none of
those functions for which they now look to it. It will no longer supply
them, as now, with any special pinnacle on which human life may raise
itself. The one type of it that is at present on an eminence will sink
to the same level as the others. All these will be offered to us