progress, that, as an outcome of the present age, it seems little short
of a miracle. Professing to embody what that age considers its special
characteristics, what it really embodies is the most emphatic negation
of these. It professes to rest on experience, and yet no Christian
legend ever contradicted experience more. It professes to be sustained
by proof, and yet the professions of no conjuring quack ever appealed
more exclusively to credulity.

Its appearance, however, will cease to be wonderful, and its real
significance will become more apparent, if we consider the class of
thinkers who have elaborated and popularised it. They have been men and
women, for the most part, who have had the following characteristics in
common. Their early training has been religious;[28] their temperaments
have been naturally grave and earnest; they have had few strong
passions; they have been brought up knowing little of what is commonly
called the world; their intellects have been vigorous and active; and
finally they have rejected in maturity the religion by which all their
thoughts have been coloured. The result has been this. The death of
their religion has left a quantity of moral emotions without an object;
and this disorder of the moral emotions has left their mental energies
without a leader. A new object instantly becomes a necessity. They are
ethical Don Quixotes in want of a Dulcinea; the best they can find is
happiness and the progress of Humanity; and to this their imagination
soon gives the requisite glow. Their strong intellects, their activity,
and their literary culture each supplements the power that it
undoubtedly does give, with a sense of knowing the world that is
altogether fictitious. They imagine that their own narrow lives, their
own feeble temptations, and their own exceptional ambitions represent
the universal elements of human life and character; and they thus expect
that an object which has really been but the creature of an impulse in