THE SUPERSTITION OF POSITIVISM.

Glendower. _I can call spirits from the vasty deep._

Hotspur. _Why so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?_
Henry IV. Part 1.


General and indefinite as the foregoing considerations have been, they
are quite definite enough to be of the utmost practical import. They are
definite enough to show the utter hollowness of that vague faith in
progress, and the glorious prospects that lie before humanity, on which
the positive school at present so much rely, and about which so much is
said. To a certain extent, indeed, a faith in progress is perfectly
rational and well grounded. There are many imperfections in life, which
the course of events tends manifestly to lessen if not to do away with,
and so far as these are concerned, improvements may go on indefinitely.
But the things that this progress touches are, as has been said before,
not happiness, but the negative conditions of it. A belief in this kind
of progress is not peculiar to positivism. It is common to all educated
men, no matter what their creed may be. What is peculiar to positivism
is the strange corollary to this belief, that man's subjective powers of
happiness will go on expanding likewise. It is the belief not only that
the existing pleasures will become more diffused, but that they will, as
George Eliot says, become '_more intense in diffusion_.' It is this
belief on which the positivists rely to create that enthusiasm, that
impassioned benevolence, which is to be the motive power of their whole
ethical machinery. They have taken away the Christian heaven, and have
thus turned adrift a number of hopes and aspirations that were once