it. The purest heaven, we are told, that the men of any generation can
look forward to, will be the increased gladness that their right conduct
will secure for a coming generation: and that gladness, when it comes,
will be, as it were, the seraphic song of the blessed and holy dead.
Thus every present, for the positivist, is the future life of the past;
earth is heaven perpetually realising itself; it is, as it were, an
eternal choir-practice, in which the performers, though a little out of
tune at present, are becoming momently more and more perfect. If this be
so, there is a heaven of some sort about us at this moment. There is a
musical gladness every day in our ears, our actual delight in which it
might have been a heaven to our great-grandfathers to have anticipated
in the last century.

Now it is plain that this alleged music is not everywhere. Where, then,
is it? And will it, when we have found it, be found to merit all the
praise that is bestowed upon it? Sociology, as we have seen, may show us
how to secure to each performer his voice or his instrument; but it will
not show us how to make either the voice or the instrument a good one;
nor will it decide whether the orchestra shall perform Beethoven or
Offenbach, or whether the chorus shall sing a penitential psalm or a
drinking song. When we have discovered what the world's highest gladness
can consist of, we will again come to the question of how far such
gladness can be a general end of action.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Vide _Nineteenth Century_, October, 1877.

[10] '_As Mr. Spencer points out, society does not resemble those
organisms which are so highly centralised that the unity of the whole is