that the positivists are preparing for themselves, we shall see how
utterly chimerical is their entire practical system. It is like a
drawing of a cathedral, which looks magnificent at the first glance, but
which a second glance shows to be composed of structural
impossibilities--blocks of masonry resting on no foundations, columns
hanging from the roofs, instead of supporting them, and doors and
windows with inverted arches. The positive system could only work
practically were human nature to suffer a complete change--a change
which it has no spontaneous tendency to make, which no known power could
ever tend to force on it, and which, in short, there is no ground of
any kind for expecting.

There are two characteristics in men, for instance, which, though they
undoubtedly do exist, the positive system requires to be indefinitely
magnified--the imagination, and unselfishness. The work of the
imagination is to present to the individual consciousness the remote
ends to which all progress is to be directed; and the desire to work for
these is, on the positive supposition, to conquer all mere personal
impulses. Now men have already had an end set before them, in the shape
of the joys of heaven, which was far brighter and far more real to them
than these others can ever be; and yet the imagination has so failed to
keep this before them, that its small effect upon their lives is a
commonplace with the positivists themselves. How then can these latter
hope that their own pale and distant ideal will have a more vivid effect
on the world than that near and glowing one, in whose place they put it?
Will it incite men to virtues to which heaven could not incite them? or
lure them away from vices from which hell-fire would not scare them?
Before it can do so, it is plain that human nature must have completely
changed, and its elements have been re-mixed, in completely new
proportions. In a state of things where such a result was possible, a