BBS 
 
 DISCOURSI^:S' 
 
 POSITIVE RELIGION 
 
 J. H. BRIDGES, M.B. 
 
 SOM?: TiMK i-F.r.r.o^v hf i->rifl college, oxford ; fellow of the colleoe 
 
 PHYSICIANS, LONDON. 
 
 SECOND F.IIITI(>!\' A'KI7,SKO /IND ENLARGED. 
 
 LONDON: REEVES AND TURNER, lyb STRAND. 
 
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 PRICE ONF, stiir.r.iNC. 
 
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 GIVEN FOUNDATION BOOK FUND 
 
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 CLASS OF 1896 
 
Cornell University Library 
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DISCOURSES 
 
 POSITIVE RELIGION. 
 
 J. H. BRIDGES, M.D. 
 
 LONDON : REEVES AND TURNER, ig6 STRAND. 
 
 i8gi. 
 
These Discourses were delivered on various occasions. 
 They have no other connection than that given by a doctrine 
 claiming to be applicable to every aspect of life. 
 
 Prayer and Work 
 
 Religion an^ Progress 
 
 PosiTivisT Mottoes 
 
 The Bi-centenary of Calderon ... 
 
 Man the Creature of Humanity 
 
 CoMTE : The Successor of Aristotle and St. Paul 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 I 
 23 
 47 
 69 
 
 91 
 "3 
 
I. 
 
 PRAYER AND WORK. 
 
PRAYER AND WORK. 
 
 1. 
 
 We meet here to-day to celebrate the festival of Humanity. 
 By thought and by feeling we seek to enter into the presence 
 of that assemblage of noble lives, who, from the earliest ages 
 until now, have laboured for the benefit of men, and have 
 left a store of material and spiritual good from which all the 
 blessings of our present life have issued. Before the resist- 
 less power of this unseen host we bow in thankful subinission ; 
 knowing well that of ourselves we are insufficient, either to 
 see or to do what is right. Whatever wider thoughts or 
 generous impulses prompt us to rise above ourselves, and to 
 live unselfishly, come to us from a higher source. They are 
 the free gift of Humanity. 
 
 We commemorate, therefore, with thankful hearts, the 
 service rendered by the countless generations of men, from 
 the earliest ages till now, who lived and died unknown, 
 but whose labours are our inheritance ; the love that bound 
 them to a common hearth ; the loyalty that knit them 
 together in danger ; the gentle courage that brought the 
 higher animal races into friendly service ; the subtlety of 
 hand and' eye that mastered the first arts of peaceful union ; 
 the simple beliefs that fostered the first germs of reverence ; 
 for these things are at the root of human progress ; the 
 starting point in the struggle upwards to a higher life. 
 
 We commemorate the service of those wise leaders of men, 
 whether in Egypt, India, or Judea, who saved men's lives 
 from the waste of deadly strife, by laying down the first rules 
 for their guidance ; to whom it is due that reverence for 
 parents, inviolability of marriage, respect for life, and truth- 
 ful intercourse between man and man, have been clothed 
 with a vesture of sanctity that has endured through ages. 
 
 We commemorate the nation whose great men, bursting 
 through the oppressive bonds of theocratic dominion, sought 
 to idealize and to enlighten human life, by art founded on 
 
 * This address was delivered January ist, 1879, 
 
reality, and by discovery of the laws of nature ; and chief 
 among these we speak of Homer and of yEschylus, of Thales, 
 Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Archimedes. 
 
 We commemorate the Roman State, eternal type of heroic 
 endurance sustairied through centuries, using the arts of 
 conquest and of government for the establishment of a peace- 
 ful dominion, from which the commonwealth of Western 
 States has sprung. And from the long roll of her great 
 names we take the three greatest ; Scipio, Csesar, Trajan. 
 
 We commemorate the Catholic Church founded by St. 
 Paul, and built up of the holy lives of countless men and 
 women who, seeking to deny themselves and to purify their 
 lives from every selfish thought, became a leavening influence 
 in the world around them, a spiritual power not resting on 
 the force of armies and the ordinances of magistrates, but on 
 the inward force of conscience. 
 
 We commemorate the mediaeval rulers, Charlemagne, 
 Alfred, or Godfrey, who, uniting Roman energy with Chris- 
 tian faith, created in chivalry the new ideal of manhood, the 
 loyal sense of honour, the reverent protection of weakness ; 
 and who saved the Western world from the barbaric floods 
 that threatened to overwhelm it. 
 
 We commemorate the birth of civic-industry, purified 
 henceforth for ever from the stain of slavery, gaining, under 
 the guidance of Gutenberg, Watt, and countless others, 
 mastery over the forces of our planet, and thus, when wisely 
 directed to its true social purpose, setting hnman energies 
 free for higher aims. We celebrate the poets, painters, and 
 musicians of modern Europe, Dante, Raphael, Shakespeare, 
 and Mozart, who, amidst the inevitable decay of religious 
 faith, have kept alive the flame of ideal sympathy, and have 
 saved us from the death of sordid vulgarity or acrid political 
 agitation ; the audacious spirit of Descartes, of Bacon, and 
 the other lamps of modern philosophy, who swept away the 
 fictions that stifled the growth of thought, and concentrated 
 intellectual force on the ennoblement of human life by 
 prescient submission to the order of nature ; the vigorous 
 statesmen, William, Cromwell, Frederic, whose firm govern- 
 ment was the surest defence of free thought against corrupt 
 and retrogade superstition ; and, finally, the men of special 
 science, of whom Kepler, Newton, and Bichat are worthy to 
 be the types, who, availing themselves of the freedom thus 
 secured, and of the methods of research thus opened to them, 
 unfolded to us, each in his own sphere, the laws of the 
 material world around us, and of vegetable and animal life. 
 
 The lives and works of all these men seem to us to find 
 their central meeting-point in the founder of the Religion of 
 Humanity, who first revealed to us how, unknown to them- 
 
selves, they worked together towards a common purpose; 
 and who, by estabHshing the spiritual truths of man's nature, 
 so long contested by revolutionary scepticism, upon the sure 
 basis of science, has been the restorer of true religious con- 
 viction to mankind. 
 
 With these greater names we join the multitude whom no 
 man can number of beautiful and self-denying lives of whom 
 no record is left, but who have, none the less continued to live 
 from generation to generation in those whom their purity and 
 their strength inspired. 
 
 With the strength given by this communion with the past, 
 we desire to join our own measure of service in sympathy 
 with men and women of all creeds and countries who strive 
 to live rightly, in sympathy yet more close for those who 
 cling with noble hopes to the religious faith which we have 
 left, or with those who having left it, in ardour for true pro- 
 gress, have found as yet no stable foundation for their action ; 
 in fellowship of a more special kind with those of our faith, 
 in Paris, in London, in Ireland, and in other lands, who look 
 forward amidst the turmoil and discouragement around them, 
 to the sure hope of a more blessed future, for the full attain- 
 ment of which it is none the less our highest happiness to 
 work that our own eyes will not behold it. That in this 
 cause our zeal may continue so long as life shall last, and 
 may spread from us to others who, entering into our labours 
 with firmer courage and wider insight, shall bring them to a 
 good result, is our earnest prayer. 
 
 II. 
 
 The time has now come for each one of us to examine 
 very thoroughly the position which he holds ; to sound its 
 foundations ; to test the superstructure. Each one of us has 
 now to ask himself, how far the faith which he professes is in 
 any true sense a religion to him ; how far it enables him to 
 pray. I use that old word because there is absolutely no 
 other that expresses the facts of the case so simply. After 
 every wish that the laws of nature may be suspended for our 
 individual benefit has been unflinchingly set aside, the final 
 meaning of the word remains ; rather, it appears for the first 
 time in all its purity. To pray is to form the ideal of our 
 life, by entering into communion with the Highest. 
 
 The faith of the Mussulman is concentrated in a single 
 word, Islam ; devotion, resignation of our own will to the 
 supreme decree. That word was not limited by Mahommed 
 to his own followers ; it was use.d ungrudgingly of his Judaic 
 and Christian predecessors. There is no fitter word for the 
 
 B 2 
 
religion of the human race. If there is any one word in 
 Western language which can translate it fully, it is the word 
 rehgion itself; and that word needs interpretation for ears- 
 untrained in Latin speech. The word Islam unfolds itself 
 for us, as for the followers of Mahommed, into the two great 
 and inseparable aspects of life: — prayer and work. Pray 
 and give alms, said Mahommed ; almsgiving in his wide inter- 
 pretation of it, conceived with admirable "wisdom relatively to 
 the simple wants of his time, covering the whole field of doing 
 good to men. Pray and work, said the mediajval saint : pray 
 as though nothing were to be done by work : work as though 
 nothing were to be gained by prayer. 
 
 In different ways and under every possible variety of 
 language and symbol, the same thing is said by every 
 spiritual leader of men in every age and country. I find it in 
 Confucius, the founder of the faith that has kept Chinese 
 society together for five-and-twenty centuries : I find it in 
 the ancient theocracy of Hindostan ; I find it in the monu- 
 ments of Egypt as their secrets are gradually revealing them- 
 selves to modern learning. I read it in the premature effort of 
 Pythagoras, premature, yet profoundly fruitful of momentous 
 result, to found in the chaotic democracies of Greece a disci- 
 pline of life upon a human basis. And last of all I find it 
 where most men think a monopoly of such knowledge is to be 
 found, in the Hebrew and Christian Bible. 
 
 Islam, then, or in the English tongue, devotion — the devo- 
 tion of our life to the highest, the bringing of our own will 
 into accordance with the supreme will ; this is the word that 
 sums up the lives of pious men in every age and every country. 
 They have framed for themselves an ideal, a model, a pattern 
 of what their life should be. They have done their utmost to 
 make that ideal a reality. In other words, they have prayed, 
 and they have worked. 
 
 Omitting then all those points in which the religions of 
 the world are hostile to each other, leaving out of sight all 
 those disputable articles of faith which, ifthey be exclusively 
 true for any one case, must be false for all the rest, we find 
 underneath all the countless varieties of form, something that 
 abides, that remains for ever the same ; and this abiding 
 truth is the groundwork of positive religion. That the 
 foundations of that religion are not new but old, is the first 
 reason why it deserves our notice. Were they new, its up- 
 holders would deserve the laughter that Moliere heaped on 
 the physician who pretended to have changed the position of the 
 organs of the human body. Religion is simply spiritual health ; 
 so long as man is man its principles must always be the same. 
 No nostrum can secure it, no royal road can reach it, 
 for it is the very essence of the life of man ; it is the state 
 
in which all his energies are harmoniously guided to the 
 highest aim. 
 
 That the value of prayer was something entirely apart 
 from the personal and material advantages supposed to be 
 •derived from it, has been dimly felt by good men of all ages, 
 and clearly seen by the wise. That men, by using set fornis 
 of words, should be able to effedl a change in the laws of the 
 distribution of wealth or in the diredlion of rain-clouds, is a 
 superstition which, though it lingers in our official prayer- 
 book to the present day, it is hardly necessary to meet with 
 serious discussion. Thoughtful men in Greek and Roman 
 times had entirely discarded it. The diffusion of a thin layer 
 •of knowledge in our own time is sufficient for its rapid disap- 
 pearance. The inockery of sceptics and the deepest feelings 
 of pious people, if they have not been in unison in this respetft, 
 at least have worked very visibly to the same end. 
 
 The flimsiest acquaintance with the laws of nature has 
 shown the absurdity of supposing them liable to a continued 
 process of miraculous disturbance from the arbitrary and 
 inconsistent caprices of believers. And at the same time, 
 the convidlion, which with truly religious people has always 
 been strong, has of late years become very far stronger, that 
 the true purpose and meaning of prayer is communion with 
 the Highest ; the outpouring of ardent aspirations ; the 
 formation of a loftier and more ideal standard of life ; the 
 •earnest resolution to attain it. 
 
 With this loftier and purer conception of prayer it is very 
 ■evident that Positivists are in complete sympathy. Nay, it is 
 •clear that so far as such a conception is formed, it is not 
 merely in sympathy with Positivism, but is itself wholly and 
 •entirely Positivist. Positivism is concerned with facft : with 
 the facfts of the world as they touch man, with the fa(5ls of 
 man himself. And it is concerned with these fadts not from 
 speculative curiosity, but with the purpose of moulding them 
 to the highest human uses. Positivism, then, is something 
 -which, taking its stand on what is real, aims at what is ideal. 
 But, in the spiritual region, this is the very meaning and 
 purpose of prayer : that taking the fadts of our poor, feeble, 
 soiled, imperfedl nature precisely as they are, making a full 
 confession of the truth as it stands, without concealment or 
 self-deception of any kind, we should strive to purify and 
 elevate it, availing ourselves of all the " means of grace " as 
 the old religionists called them, that is to say, of all the 
 influences for spiritual good that lie in profusion around our 
 life,- ready for all that will accept them, dwell upon them, and 
 ponder them in their hearts. 
 
 To measure the facfls of our life, concealing none of its 
 failures, acknowledging its miserable shortcomings, to form 
 
an ideal standard for its amendment, using all the highest 
 influences for good that lie within our reach ; this, then, would 
 seem to be the true and permanent conception of prayer. 
 Let us pass on for a while to consider what are these in- 
 fluences for good which surround us, and which may help 
 each one of us to higher things. 
 
 The first and most obvious answer would be to point to 
 the central objedt of Positivist worship, Humanity; the 
 assemblage of noble human energies which, during the long 
 course of ages, has prepared this inheritance into which we 
 have entered. Humanity is the highest that we know. There 
 is no higher word to represent the supreme order to which 
 man is subjedt. For Humanity being herself subjedl to the 
 laws of the surrounding world, to the forces which, through a 
 long course of ages, have fitted this planet to become her 
 habitation, to the supreme conditions of space and time 
 governing the whole universe of things from human thoughts 
 to stellar systems, is the representative to us of this supreme 
 order ; and is clothed, in addition, with the intenser interest 
 following from the human strivings, aspirations, and sym- 
 pathies of which she is built up, and from the germs of 
 unrevealed greatness which lie latent in her future. 
 
 Communion with Humanity, then, that is to say, the 
 attempt to bring before ourselves strongly and definitely that 
 stream of continuous effort for good, whether material or 
 moral, which has flowed from the first ages till now, and 
 which is the source of our spiritual life, would seem to be 
 the sole centre and stronghold of Positivist prayer. 
 
 Yet it is not altogether so that Comte has regarded the 
 subject. He knew human nature far too well to think that 
 it was possible for men to rise suddenly, and by a single 
 bound, from the love of self to the love of humanity. We 
 are knit together by many bonds, some narrower and more 
 intense, some weaker but more wide. Those who have 
 broken loose from the stronger ties are not likely to feel the 
 force of the weaker. Love gathers round the home and 
 slowly widens to the fatherland before it can reach to higher 
 and wider ranges. The narrower circle must be well filled 
 before the outer circles are entered. 
 
 It was said of old, " If any man come to me, and hate not 
 his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren 
 and sisters, yea an,d his own life also, he cannot be my 
 disciple." These were no vain words, as the history of the 
 Christian church has often proved. Some of the societies 
 that have arisen in that church, and that have had much to 
 do'with its action, have striven hard to put them in practice. 
 The Dominican and the Jesuit deliberately strove, and not 
 seldom strove successfully, to strip off the encumbrance of 
 
earthly affections, that so that they might devote themselves 
 more ardently to the propagation of their faith. Admitting the 
 heroic and the saintly side in the lives of very many of these 
 men, and one must be blind not to see this, yet how terrible 
 was the loss, how mutilated the life, how disastrous the re- 
 sult ! how certain was it to come to this, that men would end 
 by identifying their own narrow systems with the interests 
 of their church ; that, holding these to be supreme, and 
 being unchecked by the noble inconsistencies that spring 
 from home, and love, and friendship, and contact with men in 
 the daily round of civic duty, they would be driven straight 
 forward by one intense mechanical impulse, like a cannon- 
 ball spending its force upon a wall of living flesh, till its 
 power for misery was gone. Stirely the history of the Spanish 
 Inquisition, or the war waged by Jesuits in later times against 
 the whole stream of human progress, or again, Robespierre's 
 organisation of massacre in the name of Rousseauist philan- 
 thropy, are proofs plain enough of what comes when men 
 ride roughshod over the charities and duties of home life in 
 the name of duty to God, or to the church, or to the human 
 race ; mixing up, as they are well-nigh sure to do, their 
 aspirations for the public welfare with the fumes of com- 
 bative self-will or irritated ambition ; blinding their sense of 
 public good with the prejudiced delusions of self-love ; so 
 that at last unscrupulous means are justified for pious ends, 
 evil is done that good may follow ; and the highest attributes 
 of manhood, mercy, loyalty, and justice, are swept clean away. 
 Between the love of self and the love of Humanity, Posi- 
 tivism interposes two intermediate objects of our love ; the 
 home,* the city. With philanthropy severed from its root 
 in the home and in the fatherland, with the abstract love of 
 mankind that has no reverence and tenderness to spare for 
 mother or wife or child, no loyalty to friend, no glow of 
 patriotism at a fellow-countryman's heroic deed or brilliant 
 thought, Positivism has no sympathy whatever. " It is from 
 personal experience of strong love," says Comte, " that we 
 rise by degrees to a sincere affection for all mankind." " The 
 man who is incapable of deep affection for one whom he has 
 chosen for his partner in the most intimate relations of life 
 can hardly expect to be believed when he professes devotion 
 ' to a mass of human beings of whom he knows nothing. The 
 heart cannot throw off its original selfishness without the aid 
 of that affection which by virtue of its concentration on one 
 object is the most complete and enduring." f 
 
 * In this word is included the whole circle of private affections ; differ- 
 ing in range, intensity, and direction, according to the iniinite variety of 
 circumstance. 
 
 t Positive Polity, vol. i, p. 189, Eng. Trans. 
 
In the home, then, begins with infancy our earliest training 
 in the instincts of love, by which alone in after years our 
 service of humanity can become real and fruitful ; and in the 
 home, under pain of barrenness and failure, that training 
 must go on till death. That ideal of life which the Positivist 
 calls prayer is to be fostered and purified by daily thought 
 on the ties which bind us to those we love, and whose lives 
 form part of our own, whether in the past or present. Comte 
 has dwelt on this largely in his Positivist Catechism, and has 
 laid down with regard to it what some readers of that book 
 call precepts, but what I prefer to regard as typical examples, 
 drawn from his own personal experience, and rendering his 
 meaning far more definite and clear than it could otherwise have 
 been : for the rest, to be modified by every one for himself in 
 accordance with the infinitely-varying conditions of our per- 
 sonal life. Sufficient to say that those who have played the 
 greatest part in forming the character of most men certainly, 
 possibly of most women, are women rather than men. And 
 since the formation of charadter is incomparably the most 
 important work that can be done in human life, it follows 
 inevitably that this fadl, the predominance, namely, in the 
 deepest things of our moral life, of womanhood over manhood, 
 will show itself in the outpourings of private meditation, and 
 ultimately, when the time shall be ripe, in public manifesta- 
 tions also ; the highest honour' being paid where the highest 
 honour is due. 
 
 Those who read Comte with uncandid or superficial 
 thoughts have fallen into the mistake of supposing that he 
 fabricated idols endowed with sentimental and impossible 
 perfetftions, and offered them to men to worship. Were this 
 true, it would surely be utterly inconsistent with the whole 
 spirit of Positivism : for the very spirit of Positivism is frankly 
 to admit and fully to acknowledge the Real with all its obvious 
 imperfedtions and failures, as the basis from which the Ideal 
 is to spring ; dwelling on the beautiful and hopeful and 
 tender side of things, and throwing into shade that which is 
 hard and callous ; with reverent and humble admiration for 
 excellence; with piety not less reverent for weakness and 
 ahortcoming; always aiming at the true progress which comes 
 by slow natural growth, not impatient for sudden changes of 
 nature which can only be apparent not real. To idealise our 
 relations with those we love is, — not to cut rag and tinsel into 
 the shape and tint of artificial flowers, — but to imitate the 
 skilful gardener who contends with difficulties of soil and 
 climate, and by patient, tender care brings the beautiful wild 
 rose into one still more lovely in form and fragrance. 
 
 Such at least seems to me the spirit of that inward medi- 
 tation with which Comte counsels his disciples to begin their 
 
day. Thankfulness for what we have received from others, 
 earnest resolution to repay the debt by purer and more un- 
 selfish service ; rising slowly from the sacred influences of the 
 hearth, to the wider range of public duty ; tilling the garden 
 round the house before we reclaim Indian swamps or African 
 deserts ; yet guided always and throughout by self-renouncing 
 devotion to the highest hopes of humanity ; this is the mean- 
 -ing and purpose of Positivist prayer. 
 
 And if we are told that it is nothing new, we gladly accept 
 that assurance ; believing as we do that it has been a part, 
 .and the best part, of the prayer of devout men from the 
 beginning of the world. 
 
 Or if, again, it is said that systematic meditation of this 
 kind is needless, because the highest life may be led without 
 it, we need not deny this, believing as we do in the infinite 
 superiority of noble acftion to noble thought or resolution of 
 any kind. Yet wise men of all times, who have watched the 
 instability of man's spirit, the changefulness of his moods, 
 the uneven, uncertain temper in which he looks at his higher 
 duties, have recognised the need of method, of discipline, of 
 what may be called the hygiene of the soul. A few words 
 •of Thomas a Kempis will express this clearly.' 
 
 " Trust not to thy feeling ; for whatever it be now, it will 
 quickly be changed into another thing. 
 
 " As long as thou livest, thou are subjecft to mutability, 
 even against thy will ; so as thou art found one while merry, 
 another while sad ; one while quiet, another while troubled ; 
 now devout, then indevout ;' now diligent, then listless ;. now 
 grave, and then light. 
 
 " But he that is wise and well instruefted in the spirit 
 standeth fast upon these mutable things ; not heeding what 
 he feeleth in himself, or which way the wind of instability 
 blowetlj ; but so that the whole intention of his mind tendeth 
 to the right and best end. 
 
 " For thus he will be able to continue throughout, and 
 the self-same, and unshaken ; in the midst of so many various 
 events the single eye of his intention being diredted unceas- 
 ingly towards Me."* 
 
 And let the imagination of each one try to conceive, for 
 assuredly the imagination of the boldest would fail adequately 
 to represent, the growth in all the nobler elements of human 
 life, the advancement of that kind of progress which consists 
 in the triumph of good over evil, that would result, were the 
 feelings of religious men and women concentrated during the 
 earliest minutes of every day upon the work of clothing with 
 beauty and mercy and truth that one department of hiiman 
 
 * Book iii., ch. 33. 
 
lO 
 
 life which the weakest and humblest have power to modify, 
 the relations of their home. Think of the infinite readlions 
 on public life that would follow were such motive powers set 
 in adtion ; of the stimulus that would be given to truth 
 and loyalty ; of the control that would be exercised over 
 feverish speculations, or mean competitions, or noisy poli- 
 tical facflion, or acrid personal animosities. The public life 
 of men would again become beautiful as in the noblest 
 days of our forefather; only without the misery of inter- 
 national hatreds, with which the nobleness of Roman and 
 mediaeval life was so inseparably connected. 
 
 It will have been remarked that I have spoken exclusively 
 of private devotion, as Positivists understand it. I have said 
 nothing of public religious manifestations. Nor have I at 
 present very much to say. It will be noted, however, that 
 the two modes of devotion, public and private, stand, neither 
 in Comte's writings, nor by their intrinsic character, on the 
 same level of urgency. The one is an essential part of the 
 religious life, incumbent on all Positivists,* whether now or 
 in the future, whether they live in large groups or dispersed 
 and isolated. The other depends essentially on temperament, 
 on opportuneness, on place and circumstance. The difference 
 is marked in Comte's own life with unmistakeable plainness. 
 To private meditation and devotion he consecrated the first 
 hour of every day for years. But he never attempted the 
 composition or the recital of any public liturgy ; advising his 
 followers, when once they had made their position clear from 
 all reproach of hypocrisy, to avail themselves of the religious 
 services and assemblies of the Catholic Church, till the time 
 should be opportune for presenting the festivals of the 
 religion of Humanity with something like an adequate 
 foreshadowing of their ultimate splendour. 
 
 Long before that time may arrive, however, meetings of 
 those who share our faith, whether for purposes of social 
 intercourse, of instruction, of practical action, or of religious 
 commemoration, will be possible and expedient. The 
 festival of to-day, and the commemoration of the death 
 of the founder, have been observed in Paris for twenty 
 years ; and last year a large group assembled round the 
 tomb of the founder, an example to be imitated in future 
 years, frequently by those who live near, once at the least 
 in their lives by those whose distance from Paris is the 
 greatest. 
 
 Gradually religious gatherings of all kinds will become 
 more frequent ; and this is much to be desired. Only let 
 
 *When I say " incumbent ", I mean that it follows inevitably from all 
 sincere acceptance and application of Positive doctrine to the facts of 
 man's moral life. 
 
them be regarded not as the end, but as the means to an 
 end. Such meetings are not religion itself: they form but 
 one out of many modes through which religion may become 
 a reaUty to us. It is obvious, I think, that much latitude 
 must here be left for differences of feeling and temperament ; 
 much also for difference of circumstance. 
 
 The united outpouring of strong emotion acts, we all 
 know, strongly upon each who shares in it. Let it be borne 
 in mind that, apart from Positivist meetings, we are not left 
 destitute of this source of spiritual strength. Knowing that 
 religion of a most real though imperfect kind has existed in 
 the world always, and is to be found everywhere around us 
 it is open to us, so soon as our own doctrinal position has 
 become unmistakeably clear, to be present, without hypocrisy, 
 rather with deep and unfeigned sympathy, at the religious 
 services of other faiths than our own. Extending this tacit 
 co-operation with perfect impartiality to all creeds alike. 
 Catholic, Protestant, or Mussulman, we are preserved from 
 entanglement in the dogmas peculiar to either. 
 
 People will feel, and must be allowed to feel, variously in 
 things of this kind. I must be considered as speaking for 
 myself alone, when I say that for my own part I get more of 
 the sense of communion with my fellow-men, and even with 
 the past and future of humanity, by listening to the organ 
 and choir in St. Paul's Cathedral pealing out one of the 
 magnificent anthems of the Anglican church, than by the 
 bare recital of invocations to Humanity in a Positivist meet- 
 ing. I speak, I again repeat, solely for myself in this, with- 
 out venturing to criticise in the slightest way the feelings of 
 others, which may possibly differ widely in this respect from 
 mine. For in principle there is no difference whatever. I 
 only feel that, for myself, I prefer to wait till the resources 
 of poetry and music and the other arts can be called in to 
 render with some approach to justice the varied splendour, 
 the genial gaiety, the deep and wide sympathies, the sweet 
 modulations of spirit, alternately solemn, bright, and tender, 
 of the object of Positive worship. Think that the Positivist 
 calendar holds up for "our veneration, not merely Moses, and- 
 Bouddha, and Abraham and Mahomet, and St. Paul and St. 
 Augustin, but also Homer und ^schylus, and Aristophanes, 
 and Shakespeare and Ariosto, and Cervantes, and Moliere, 
 and Mozart ; and it may seem at least worth considering, 
 whether the infinite variety and many-sidedness of the 
 festivals of humanity which future generations will enjoy, 
 may not be concealed rather than promoted by attempts 
 which with our present scanty numbers and these in- 
 sufficiently prepared by long continuance of deep and inward 
 conviction, must inevitably be imperfect and immature. 
 
III. 
 
 Be this as it may, prayer, public or private, is but the gate 
 through which to enter upon a field of work. Prayer without 
 work is either a Pharisaical and hypocritical routine, odious 
 to those to whom true religion is dear, or else it is mysticism ; 
 that is to say, a luxurious abandoment of the soul to elevated 
 emotions, which, when not followed by prompt action, act 
 as a spiritual opiate, and paralyse the powers they were 
 intended to stir and kindle. 
 
 Prayer and work, — Desire united with effort, aspiration 
 for the highest followed instantly by lifting of the foot up 
 the first steep step of the long ladder that leads to it — this is 
 the essence of all religion that has ever deserved the name. 
 In other words, it is the essence of all spiritual health. What 
 we preach is nothing new, we are told. If it were altogether 
 new, if its main substance were not older than Rome, or 
 Jerusalem, or the temples of Egypt, if we could not trace it 
 back to the first family that clustered round a hearth, to the 
 first rude combat where men stood loyally together in defiance 
 of a common foe, — why then it could not be true. Man has 
 the same physical frame as he had, modified in secondary 
 ways, by climate and race, but unaltered in its principal out- 
 lines, or in internal organs ; and man's mode of spiritual 
 life, resulting from the ways in which men have lived toge- 
 ther, and handed down the growing framework of tradition 
 from one generation to another, are fundamentally the same 
 also. True, the higher and more delicate the functions of 
 life are, the more possible it is to modify them. But in their 
 essence the}' remain the same. The heart beats on the left 
 side of the chest, and not on the right, nor will all the phy- 
 sicians of Moliere's plays alter that arrangement. 
 
 Therefore the religious state is essentially the same in 
 all times and in all places. For there is only one human 
 nature : under myriad modes of character and costume, still 
 in all underlying principles the same. Religion is the health 
 of that nature, the balance of its faculties, resulting from 
 their concentration on an unselfish purpose which calls the 
 whole of them into play. Therefore, there can be only one 
 religion. 
 
 And yet, when we have said this, and laid it down as a 
 £xed starting-point, as a foundation stone on which the whole 
 superstructure of our faith must rest, we know too well that 
 from another point of view the case is far otherwise. For if 
 there is one state, and one only of perfect health, there are 
 many modes of the imperfect, many modes of disease ; and 
 equally various are the attempts to cure, be these chimerical 
 
or sound. It is not difficult to imagine a paradise in which 
 there should be no hunger and cold, from which the wild 
 beast scramble for existence, whether we call it war or indus- 
 trial competition, should be utterly shut out, and where the 
 only toil should he that of putting together new words, new 
 shapes, new sounds, so as to make life more beautiful to those 
 around us. There would be no religious problem in such a 
 land as this, for life itself would be one continuous poem or 
 prayer. 
 
 The^ facts of life, as we know too well, are far other than 
 these. There has been a slow painful struggle upwards from 
 the wild beast to the man, which is as yet not nearly over, 
 and which has kindled in its course passions far fiercer than 
 any tiger's ; and the problem for wise men has been how to 
 bring these wild desires and raging lusts into subjection ; 
 how to give the mastery to those feelings of love and of 
 union, the germs of which are found everywhere among 
 animals no less than among men, and which only await their 
 time and opportunity of growth. 
 
 How did they solve this problem ? How did they stimu- 
 late the principle of love and so reach the end, progress ? 
 
 By revelation of a higher power, before which man bowed 
 in reverence. " The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." 
 This was the language of the early religious teachers. Oriental, 
 Greek, or Roman. Not' that they invented the gods whom 
 they held up to men's worship. They simply obeyed with 
 the profoundest sincerity a great natural law of intellectual 
 growth, the discovery of which is the starting-point of 
 Comte's work. They sincerely believed that all the sights 
 and sounds around them, all the thoughts within them, were 
 caused by the will of a supernatural being. While teaching 
 men they supposed themselves to be revealing the will of 
 God. Faith in God was the foundation of their love, and the 
 starting-point of their action. Love was their principle, the 
 will of God their basis, progress their end. 
 
 Now the sole difference between the faith of Positivists 
 and the faith of the old theologies is that for the Will of God 
 we substitute the Order of Humanity. 
 
 •Just as the planets, once thought to be moved at the, 
 pleasure of some deity within them, are now known to follow 
 fixed and measurable laws, so we find it to be with the facts 
 of human life. In due measure we can interpret those facts, 
 and know something of the law that governs them, of the 
 natural order which they follow. On that basis of natural 
 order, of positive fact, we take our stand, making it the 
 centre of our emotions, the starting-point of our action. 
 
 Hence the word by which so many have been offended,, 
 because it has to many so unsympathetic a sound, the -word 
 
H 
 
 Positivism. Yet it was chosen by the founder, we may be 
 very sure, with deliberate intention, and the more closely that 
 intention is looked for the wiser will it be found. 
 
 Most people dislike the word because there is, they think, 
 something dull, unimaginative, material, prosaic about it, as 
 opposed to what is elevated, poetic, ideal. No doubt the word 
 has carried this kind of meaning hitherto. But why was 
 this ? Not because truth was mean and ugly, but because 
 men's eyes were dim. They clutched at the facts that 
 satisfied their hunger and thirst, and gave them warm cloth- 
 ing, and housed them comfortably ; and these facts being to 
 them very certain, they called them positive. Meantime 
 their higher nature cried out for nourishment, and no 
 nourishment was at hand except such as could be drawn 
 from shadows and imaginations, which certainly were not 
 Positive, for they were as changing and as transient as the 
 clouds of sunset. 
 
 Now the special mission of Comte in this world was to 
 teach men that the higher spiritual facts connected with 
 man's life and work were as certain, as demonstrable, as 
 j>ositive as the facts of the first four rules of arithmetic, or 
 the facts of hunger and thirst, and lodging and shelter. The 
 religion he preached was Positive religion, religion standing 
 on a groundwork of undeniable fact, of demonstrable science, 
 as opposed to religions resting on the shifting basis of dis- 
 puted theological beliefs. 
 
 This is the very essence of Comte"s work and life from the 
 beginning to the end. To carry out this purpose must be the 
 chief business of his followers. The most extraordinary fea- 
 ture of Comte's life is the unity of it — the concentration 
 from first to last on a definite purpose. True, he worked for 
 twenty years without ever using the word religion, which had 
 at first seemed to him to be too closely involved in theological 
 associations to be capable of being used without danger of 
 misleading. But, in aim and purpose, the first half of his life 
 and the last were absolutely identical. From his earliest man- 
 hood to the last year of his life his fixed object was to put an 
 end to the anarchy of thought and feeling that was dis- 
 sipating the energies and endangering the civilisation of 
 Europe. And he sought to do this by placing the highest 
 spiritual truths of man's nature on the firm basis of science.-- 
 "Whether he spoke — as in his earlier days — of Sociology be- 
 coming an inductive science, or whether, as in later years, of 
 the demonstrable religion of Humanity succeeding to the 
 revealed religions of antiquity, the essential meaning in both 
 cases was one ; to convince men that the laws of mercy and 
 of justice rested on the same sure foundation as the laws of 
 number, or the revolutions of the planets. This was the 
 
15 
 
 restoration of faith as Comte conceived it ; the only faith 
 possible in the nineteenth century, the only faith that could 
 stand the test of every logical assault that could be brought 
 against it. 
 
 The Philosophie Positive — that work which has made such 
 a stir amongst men of culture, but of which they understand 
 the bearing so very dimly — had no other purpose than 
 this, to present all the principal truths affecting man's life 
 in an orderly series, and to show that the laws or condi- 
 tions of spiritual health were precisely of the same positive, 
 scientific, ascertainable kind as the laws of his bodily health ; 
 that the conditions of harmony among man's variable passions 
 were as definitely fixed, though far more difficult to realise, 
 as the conditions of harmony in the vibrations of musical 
 strings ; that misery will follow injustice with the same 
 certainty that a stone set free from the hand will fall to the 
 earth. The first and the last object of Comte's life was to 
 instil that sense of steady firm conviction which scientific 
 truth establishes in the region of man's emotions and 
 conduct. 
 
 Therefore, when I hear people speak of the " scientific 
 aspect" of Positivism, as opposed to the "religious aspect" of 
 Positivism, I ask myself. What possibly can be their meaning? 
 it would almost seem as though we were getting back to the 
 old theologies again, and establishing a rivalry or a concordat 
 between faith and science. To the older forms of religious 
 faith science was undoubtedly either distinctly hostile, or at 
 least indifferent : it stood outside them, either as an enemy or 
 as a stranger. But in Positivism the case is wholly different. 
 Science is not one of the " aspects " of Positivism ; it is the 
 very foundation on which it rests. Positivism is not,- as has 
 been said, Catholicism plus Science : it is a Catholicism be- 
 come scientific, a Catholicism of which the principal dogmas 
 are shown to be a component part of the order of the world ; 
 in exactly the same sense in which we say this of the laws of 
 number, or the laws of electricity, or the laws of life. With- 
 out science, religion, in the Positive sense of the word, has 
 simply no existence whatever. For while love is our principle 
 of action, and progress is the aim of our action, order — that is 
 to say the natural process of things as perceived by the scientific 
 intellect — is the basis on which that progressive action is to 
 rest. 
 
 Any organization of Positivism in which there is a so-called 
 religious aspect separate from the scientific aspect seems to 
 me to rest upon a mistake, and to be predestined to failure. 
 Religion does not consist -in the repetition of prayers or the 
 performance of rites or ceremonies. These things may be 
 religious, or they may be irreligious, according to the spirit 
 
i6 
 
 A otion of our heart, 
 that animates thetn. R^ligf^/^^mtnit^-- i^ is the effort for 
 mind, and will to *« -"^^^^^ and proceeding on the basis of 
 progress, animated by l°ve, atx^<J P^^ ^^ i3 then of the very 
 order. To know what tms o ^^ .^ ^^^ ^^^ specially new thing 
 essence of Positive rfig^^'^^- ^^^^ goodness and justice, truth- 
 that we have to t^ac ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^he mysterious reve- 
 fulness and purity ^^^^ prophet, be he Bouddha, Christ, or 
 lations of tins ^^^^ ^^ nature, on an order of the world 
 
 whSh^Ae followers of all these three can recognise in 
 
 '^""Therefore to make the conception of a scientific law as uni- 
 versal and as familiar as possible is a most vital part of Posi- 
 tive religion. It is this which explains the extraordinary 
 persistence shown by Comte in popularising the principles of 
 astronomy in a course of public lectures repeated for fifteen 
 years ; and also the fact that the last work of his life should 
 have been a grouping together of the most essential truths of 
 mathematics. The conviction is, therefore, very strong upon 
 my own mind that the greater part of the work we have to 
 do lies in the direction of implanting this conviction by every 
 available mode in the minds and hearts of those among whom 
 we li\e. The special work of Positivism is the establishment 
 of a renovated education, an education which shall implant 
 true religious conviction, by connecting the order of man's 
 spiritual life with the order of the physical world. It is to 
 this object that the director of the Positivist movement, M, 
 Laffitte, has, during a long course of years, and with slight 
 encouragement either from within or from without, directed 
 his principal efforts, taking, as indicated by Comte in 
 the last modelling of his synthesis, the two extremes of 
 the scientific scale, the mathematical and the moral ; 
 the perfect logical type of certainty and definite con- 
 viction, and the ultimate sphere of man's highest activity ; 
 endeavouring thus to create a school of true Postivist 
 doctrine ; to implant the sense of order, on which alone 
 true progress can rest. 
 
 We shall not be true to our principles unless we follow, as 
 far as our feebler powers may admit, in the same path. More 
 of us, it so happens, in our little English group, are qualified to 
 teach in the more human and practical end of the scale than 
 in the more logical and abstract. But it is none the less 
 important that those who undertake to teach sociology, to 
 implant the source of that human continuity to which our 
 whole social and spiritual life is due, should so far £11 up the 
 gap in their own education as to be aware of the indispensable 
 links in that continuous chain formed by Archimedes, Des- 
 cartes, and Leibnitz. 
 
I? 
 
 Failing this, there seems great danger lest Positivism, as 
 taught among us, should present the appearance of a group 
 of arbitrary and shifting opinions, listened to with the degree 
 of respect which may happen to attach to those who deliver 
 them, but having no other coherence or foundation. 
 
 The time will come, doubtless, when the foundations of 
 the Positive Church shall have been sufficiently laid, and 
 when, therefore, more effort can be concentrated on the 
 superstructure which those foundations are to support ; 
 when more regular, uniform, and copious expression can be 
 given to our feelings of devout reverence for the past, and of 
 ardent aspirations for the future ; when all conflict of 
 doctrines being over, the festivals of the Religion of 
 Humanity will call forth poetic energies among men and 
 women, that are now dormant or at least compelled to clothe 
 themselves in obscurer guise, working underground in wintry 
 weather till the spring shall break. But this time is not yet ; 
 and there would be, perhaps, some danger in premature 
 attempts to realise it. For the present we must work and 
 wait, content to leave the harvest to those that follow us. 
 Those alone are fit to be Positivists who can accept this 
 stern truth. 
 
 Where then does our work lie ? 
 
 First, I would say. Progress, that is to say Positivist work, 
 must be regarded as the development of Order. Our first 
 work, therefore, the basis of all other work, must be to learn 
 ourselves, to teach to others, or to promote the teaching of, 
 the Order of Humanity. With love for our principle, that 
 is to say, penetrating ourselves with the enthusiasm of 
 humanity, we have to find out for ourselves, and to teach 
 others the condition of wise action. The propagation by 
 every available method of the Positive synthesis, the estab- 
 lishment of the Positive faith must be the aim of each of us. 
 There is at present among us one man, and one only, who is 
 . competent himself to do the work in its entirety. I speak of 
 the chief of the Positivist body, M. Laffitte. But it is pos- 
 sible for each one of us, from the least instructed upwards, 
 to help him in this work, to encourage him by sympathy, and 
 to contribute to the pecuniary aid which is still wanting. 
 And this is the more urgent for two reasons : First, that 
 M. Laffitte, from his peculiarly close intimacy with Auguste 
 Comte during a period of twelve years, has been the deposi- 
 tory of many practical applications of the doctrine that can 
 be preserved in no other way than through his teaching : and 
 secondly, because the city in which M. Laffitte' s work is 
 carried on has been for generations the centre of the great 
 occidental revolution, and there is consequently a society 
 there ripe for the application of Positivist principles to a 
 
degree of which we in England, where theology still possesses 
 a firm hold, have little conception. 
 
 We, too, in London and elsewhere, though less perfectly, 
 may and must do something in the same direction, pene- 
 trating those around us as far as possible with the historic 
 spirit, with the principle of continuity : availing ourselves 
 always for this purpose of the Positive Calendar, which it will 
 be our business to interpret and illustrate ; and at the same 
 time doing what we can to fill up the deficiencies in our own 
 training, and familiarising ourselves for our own use, if not 
 for the teaching of others, with the logical basis of our 
 system. 
 
 Secondly, it must be our work to bring forward the appli- 
 cations of Positive principle to the problems of the day, 
 political and social, as they rise before us. The political 
 problems with which we are concerned fall chiefly under the 
 three heads of Oriental, Occidental, and National ; these 
 every year lapsing into closer connection with each other. 
 In the West it will be our duty to promote every movement 
 of opinion that tends to the harmonious union of European 
 States. We must patiently await their gradual elevation 
 into a system of self-governing republics, purified from the two 
 crushing weights that clog their progress, — their overgrown 
 military system and their bureaucracy with its official 
 machinery of stunted and stunting education,' which the 
 unfolding in its completeness of the Positive conception of 
 teaching can alone supersede. So far as our own country is 
 concerned, it will be our desire to see her influence used in 
 resisting violent change, and especially in preventing the 
 encroachment of the stronger States upon the weaker ; these 
 latter being, as we think, in a more favourable condition than 
 the rest for political advancement, the safeguard of freedom 
 in the future no less than in the past. Should the Govern- 
 ment of France remain what it is, one of moderate and peace- 
 able though empirical progress, such a policy as I indicate 
 would imply the continuation and consolidation of the Anglo- 
 French alliance as a centre round which the smaller and less 
 military States could rally ; the extreme West of Europe 
 thus interposing a firm barrier to the extension of the military 
 vices of the Eastern monarchies, which themselves, as they 
 underwent the process of collapse that inevitably, and per- 
 haps soon, awaits them, would thus be best prepared to 
 imitate the pacific policy of their neighbours. 
 
 It is, however, with Asiatic policy that Enghsh Positivists 
 must be in the immediate future more closely concerned. In 
 India we are laden with a weight of responsibility inherited 
 from three generations which thoughtful men have long felt 
 to be crushing. A policy of unscrupulous and frivolous 
 
19 
 
 ambition has led us during the past year to increase that 
 burden by aggressive action, undertaken in disregard of the 
 wisest expert judgment, and as deliberately defiant of the 
 plainest principles of right and wrong as any recorded in the 
 history of the Napoleons. Years may pass before the crop 
 thus sown shall spring up and be harvested : meanwhile, the 
 increasing chaos of Indian finance defers to a more distant 
 day the time when we are to afford abstinence from a 
 national crime now continuously committed for forty years, — 
 the maintenance of Indian revenue by forcing opium on 
 China. 
 
 It will be necessary then to let slip no occasion, first, for 
 spreading instruction as to the facts of our Eastern policy to 
 all who will listen to us ; secondly, for entering into friendly 
 and practical relations with some of those Orientals who are 
 watching with keen interest the politics of the West, thus 
 sowing the first seeds of what will ultimately become the 
 public opinion of the whole planet, operating with irresistible 
 force upon any isolated portion of it which shall ignore the 
 •plainest principles of justice. 
 
 Coming to our own country, we have to watch closely and 
 calmly the inevitable results of the industrial anarchy which 
 for the last thirty years has become increasingly critical. 
 False theories of political economy have stimulated the blind 
 rush for sudden wealth which it' was the very business of 
 cultivated publicists to have controlled. The period of grace 
 which, as a wise man warned us thirty years ago, would be 
 given us by the repeal of the corn laws, has come to an end : 
 unparalleled creation of wealth, instead of being stored, up as 
 a reservoir of force for social purposes, has been neutralised 
 by unparalleled luxurious expenditure; competition, held up 
 by economic teachers as their idol, has ended by degrading 
 the very standards of manufacture on which its triumphs had 
 rested; and men who face the future see that the people of 
 England, concentrated in vast towns, and divorced from the 
 soil to a degree unknown in any other country of the world, 
 are confronted by all the menacing problems of thirty years 
 ago magnified to a far larger scale, and without the hope of 
 temporary relief, which unloosing the floodgates of free trade 
 at that time afforded. Standing aloof, as we do, from every 
 war of classes, holding ourselves free to judge, for instance, 
 the action of trade unions with absolute independence, we 
 cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the attempts now* going 
 on to undo those legitimate results of workmen's struggles 
 which have secured for them more favourable conditions of 
 labour, need watching with most jealous care. And in these 
 
 » 1878-9. 
 
20 
 
 and other like questions we shall often be found — as we have 
 been already found— taking up the cause of the weak against 
 the strong, while ever guarding ourselves and others against 
 the delusion of supposing that any mechanical or forcible 
 solution, whether unionist or socialist, can touch the deeper 
 moral evils which lie at the root of suffering. 
 
 Here, as in the battle of opinion which is raging round us, 
 our aim will be, alhance with good men of every school and 
 party as far as they will allow themselves to work with us. 
 There is much active philanthropy around us from which, 
 while we respect its motives, we feel bound to stand aloof; 
 because it is of the kind that seeks to cure a transient evil 
 by sacrifice of permanent good ; to give temporary reHef at 
 the cost of permanent misery. We cannot help poor women 
 to get rid of their infants in creches, in order that they may 
 earn more wages ; the evils resulting from that course, such 
 as careless procreation and nurture of children, lowering of a 
 standard of family life already too miserably low, — being, as 
 we conceive, tenfold greater than the temporary pangs that 
 are alleviated. But gladly should we co-operate with the 
 wise efforts now being made in various parts of London, 
 whether by clergymen or others, to elevate the condition of 
 the poorest by fostering their sense of independence, by 
 improving their dwellings, by promoting among them the 
 highest artistic culture, and by entering with them into 
 relations of personal friendship. It may be that a few years' 
 work with such a society as that for the Organisation of 
 Charity would be useful to some of us in more ways than 
 one. 
 
 Animated by the love of humanity, holding fast to our 
 belief in the permanent principles of order, to our hopes in 
 ultimate progress, we refuse no alliance, we are intolerant of 
 no creed. We work side by side with anarchists eager to 
 uproot a palpable iniquity ; and side by side with retrogrades, 
 firm in the defence of some ancient bulwark of social life 
 against the assaults of lawless lust, or sordid avarice. Ohne 
 Hast, ohne Rast, unresting, yet not restless, we wait for the 
 time when our own creed shall approve itself as the central 
 stream in which all the stormy waters and shifting eddies of 
 European faith can unite : when it shall be seen to offer the 
 most certain and effectual way of living for others : and to 
 hold out the hope of the surest and the purest blessedness, 
 because the most free from the sense of personal reward. 
 
II. 
 
 RELIGION AND PROGRESS. 
 
RELIGION AND PROGRESS. 
 
 ' L'homme devient de plus en plus nligieux." 
 
 AUGUSTE COMTE. 
 
 About six weeks ago a remarkable man, whose powers of 
 reasoning and purity of life are recognised by all his country- 
 men, and who, by a great part of the Christian world is 
 regarded, and justly regarded, as the most forcible expositor 
 of Christian doctrine now living, was summoned from an 
 obscurity of forty years to take his place as a prince of the 
 Catholic Church. His words on that great occasion were 
 marked by the beauty of feeling which has shown itself in 
 everything that Cardinal Newman has written, and also by 
 the unmistakable clearness that has always distinguished 
 what he says from most other theological utterances of our 
 time. " To one great mischief," he said, " I have from the 
 first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have 
 resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in 
 religion. Liberalism in religion," he went on to say, " is the 
 doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that 
 one creed is as good as another ; and this is the teaching 
 which is gaining substance and force daily. Religion is in no 
 sense the bond of society. Hitherto the civil power has been 
 Christian. Even in countries separated from the Church, as 
 my own, the dictum was in force when I was young that 
 Christianity was the law of the land ; now everywhere that 
 goodly framework of piety which is the creation of Christi- 
 anity is throwing off Christianity. The dictum to which I 
 have referred, with a hundred others which followed upon 
 it, is gone or going everywhere; and by the end of the 
 century, unless the Almighty interferes, it will be forgotten. 
 Hitherto it has been considered that religion alone, with its 
 supernatural sanctions, was strong enough to ensure the 
 submission of the mass of the population to law and order ; 
 
 * This Address was the last of a series delivered in the Co-operative 
 Hall, Castle Street, in May and June, 1879. 
 
 23 
 
24 
 
 now philosophers and pohticians are bent on satisfying this 
 problem without the aid of Christianity." 
 
 Cardinal Newman said much more, but it was to the 
 same purpose. All that he said, like all that he has written 
 throughout his life, has, as I said, that inestimable gift of 
 clearness which is, after all, the principal purpose of human 
 speech, and which lets us know what it is he means by the 
 word Christianity. On the same copy of the Times from 
 which I read his words I find a speech from an enlightened 
 theologian of a different school, the Dean of Westminster. 
 He was speaking at the annual meeting of the British and 
 Foreign School Society, and he dwelt at some length upon 
 the principles on which that society was based. Those 
 principles, he said, consisted " in that common basis of 
 Christianity on which education can be conducted without 
 exciting those peculiar sentiments, or bringing to light the 
 badges, which divide us". And he went on to explain what 
 he meant by a reference to the controversy now pending as 
 to the Burial Question. It was certain, he said, that in 
 churchyards there could be no angry controversy, because 
 there were common principles of humanity, feelings deeply 
 rooted, not merely in Christian but in human nature, which 
 asserted themselves on such solemn occasions, and made any 
 use of sectarian bitterness impossible. 
 
 Now I suppose that nearly every one who heard the Dean 
 of Westminster agreed with him on the practical question at 
 issue, as we now present should probably agree likewise. 
 But for the moment I call attention to the two speeches of 
 these two doctors of the Christian world, as showing what 
 incompatible things are included in the word Christianity. 
 By the one speaker, Christianity, whatever else it means, 
 means at any rate a resolute adherence to the tenets of the 
 .Catholic Church, embodied in definite creeds, based on 
 miraculous incident, and handed down from generation to 
 generation almost unchanged through twelve or fifteen 
 centuries. The meaning of the other speaker is less easy 
 to define. It is difficult to distinguish the Christianity of 
 which he speaks from the spirit of philanthropic benevolence 
 found alike among those who accept and among those who 
 reject the Christian faith. And in any case it would seem 
 the expression of precisely that spirit of liberalism in religion 
 to protest against which has been one of the principal aims 
 of Cardinal Newman's life. Christianity is thus divided in 
 a far deeper and more real way than at the time of the 
 Reformation. There, at least, both sides, Protestant as well 
 as Cathohc, had a clearly defined creed. Now the creed of 
 the first has become drifting as cloudland, adapting itself to 
 every new change of circumstance, but as soft and shapeless 
 
25 
 
 as the morning mist. The other remains as a majestic ruin, 
 solid and unchangeable, because the slightest change would 
 crumble it to dust. 
 
 It is in no spirit of detraction that I use these words. 
 The beauty of life, the calm and trustful temper, the pious 
 hopes, the self-denying zeal that cluster round Christian 
 churches of every kind, are facts which every one must see 
 who does not blind his own eyes ; facts which I hope every 
 one here would willingly recognise. And there are many for 
 whom this is enough. Their daily round of duty spends all 
 their force ; they have not leisure or strength for entering 
 into new regions of thought, or for promoting unpopular 
 ideas. They see much that is good in the old creeds, — 
 heroism, self-denial, elevation of soul. The foundations on 
 which these creeds rest lie deep ; they care not to examine 
 them. 
 
 Now to the large mass of conscientious men and women 
 who do their duty in this simple, plain, straightforward way 
 we have nothing to offer but our profound respect for their 
 convictions, our sincere desire not to disturb them, and our 
 hope that they too may learn to respect the motives on which 
 we act, our willingness to co-operate with them in every good 
 work. Our own first message is not to them, but to that 
 large and increasing number who are seeking for convictions, 
 and who as yet have found none. And this class has an 
 importance far beyond that of numbers ; for it includes a 
 very large proportion of those who have read, who have 
 thought, who have mixed in the political life of our time. 
 We appeal to those who have passed or are passing into that 
 stage of negation of all supernatural belief which since the 
 middle of the last century has become so prevalent in France, 
 and which is by this time universally diffused through 
 Western Europe. Many of those who are in this case are 
 the very salt of their generation. They are the most con- 
 scientious, the most aspiring, the most highly cultivated, the 
 most tenderly loving, the most ardent to leave the world 
 better than they found it. Only they do not know where to 
 ■betake themselves ; they have no rallying point. Therefore 
 the weaker of them waste their lives in misguided and often 
 mischievous philanthropy, and the stronger, seeing through 
 the fallacies of this, sink into silent and ignoble apathy, — 
 
 " Like a sword laid by 
 That eats into itself, and' rusts ingloriously." 
 
 Sixty years ago a young lad, a poet of extraordinary genius, 
 astonished the world by a frank and eloquent defence of 
 Atheism. It was, in principle, little more than a selection 
 from prominent French writers of the last century. But 
 
26 
 
 every syllable of it was lit up not merely with poetic fire, but 
 with zeal for the progress of man that marked him out at 
 once from the herd of scoffers and destroyers. The name of 
 this poet was Shelley. And it is very noticeable, though I 
 think that few have remarked it, that Shelley's second poem, 
 written a year or two afterwards, though without a single 
 concession of any kind to orthodoxy, has for its motto a 
 passage from the Confessions of St. Augustine. I quote it, 
 because of its bearing on what I have to say : — 
 
 " Nondum amabam, et amare amabam, et quserebam quid amare 
 amans amare." " As yet I did not love, though I desired to love; 
 and I sought longingly for what should be loved." 
 
 Now in the very years when Shelley was pouring out his soul 
 in scornful rejection of dead idols, and blind aspirations for 
 an ideal that should come hereafter, another young man of 
 nearly the same age was meditating in Paris over the same 
 problems. His boyhood, like Shelley's, had been marked by 
 precocious zeal for the widest interests of humanity. Like 
 Shelley, he was an ardent Republican, and like him he had 
 very early come to see that the dogmas of the Established 
 Church were unbelievable. But to these conditions he added 
 a vigour and firmness of character which to those who knew 
 him recalled the old Roman type ; a tenderness of nature 
 like that of Dante, and a philosophic grasp and breadth 
 which to some of us appears without a parallel since the age 
 of Aristotle. He saw that the French Revolution, and the 
 ever-widening circle of disorder which was reaching into 
 every department of human life, — the family, the state, the 
 intercourse of states with one another, the intercourse of 
 human beings with one another, — was no transient thing, no 
 matter of to-day or yesterday. It was the final outcome of a 
 great war of principles that had been going on in Europe for 
 five centuries. The two most prominent combatants in the 
 battle were, and still are, the Catholic Church on the one 
 side, the Revolution on the other. The divine right of the 
 Church, as the representative of God, to govern men on the 
 one hand ; and on the other the inherent right of men to 
 govern themselves, or even to dispense with all government 
 whatsoever. The dispute seemed without an issue, because 
 it consisted of strong statements on either side, equally 
 incapable of proof. The Church says. Thou shalt accept 
 me as the guide of life. The Revolution says. Every man 
 henceforth shall be his own priest. What end could there 
 be to such a conflict ? 
 
 Now Comte saw that the end lay in bringing into the 
 facts of human life that sense of quiet, firm, immoveable 
 conviction which we have with regard to the world around 
 
27 
 
 us, so soon as scientific men have found out the natural pro-- 
 gress, the law, according to which these facts take place. 
 The irregular movements of the planets among the other- 
 stars were very alarming and perplexing to men for thousands. 
 of years, until astronomers had found out that they moved 
 according to a fixed law. Lightning terrified men in the 
 same way till the laws of electricity were discovered. Was. 
 there any law of the same kind to be found in the revolutions, 
 of human affairs ? Was there any natural process of growth 
 to be discovered by which opinions and principles, which 
 were apparently in deadly conflict, could be shown to take 
 their place as part of the ordinary healthy development of 
 man and of society ? 
 
 Comte discovered such a law. Like all grea't scientific 
 discoveries, it had been dimly apprehended by others before 
 him. But by none had it ever been worked out in all its details, 
 and applications. Comte showed that it was a natural law 
 in all departments of human thought that we should begin 
 by attributing what we saw to supernatural agencies ; that 
 we should end by doing without these unseen powers, and 
 by simply watching how things went on. He showed how in 
 astronomy, in physics, in chemistry, in biology, we began 
 with theological imaginings, and ended with positive explana- 
 tions. There were gods of the planets, gods of the winds, the 
 waves, the lightning; gods dwelling in the forest, and clothing- 
 themselves in the likeness of beasts, and birds, and men.. 
 Then when we found how the planets moved, how plants and 
 animals grew, these gods disappeared. 
 
 But it was not by a single bound that our belief passed 
 from the supernatural to the Positive stage. There was an 
 intermediate stage, in which the supernatural agency, the: 
 god, was replaced by a metaphysical abstraction. Why does 
 this animal live ? The first answer was, because God had 
 breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. That was the 
 theological answer. The second answer was, the animal 
 lived because its blood was pervaded by a mysterious abstrac- 
 . tion called vital spirits ; or because there were mysterious 
 particles in its substance called " physiological units ". That 
 was the metaphysical answer. And, thirdly, men gave up 
 asking the question altogether. Instead of asking why 
 animals lived, they set themselves to find out how they lived, 
 and how their life could be modified for good or evil. That 
 was the Positive answer. 
 
 Then Comte applied the same law to the facts of humar» 
 
 life. In ancient days every institution, every rule of life 
 
 came through the mouth of a lawgiver who was supposed to. 
 
 , have received it direct from the gods. That was the theo- 
 
 , logical answer. Then came the time when everything had to 
 
28 
 
 be squared with the sovereignty of the people and the right 
 of private judgment. The Rights of Man were called in to 
 explain everything. Every one has a right to do what will 
 not injure his neighbour, it was said. It would be difficult 
 to defend truth and honesty on this basis. Lying may often 
 be no injury to your neighbour. By stealing your neighbour's 
 property you may often hinder him from making a bad use of 
 it. The rights of man will help us but a very little way in 
 these things. However, this was the metaphysical answer. 
 
 Then comes the Positive answer. We find certain insti- 
 tutions, certain actions surrounded with a halo of sanctity. 
 There is a sacred tradition, a deep inherent prejudice or pre- 
 judgment in favour of honesty, chastity, truth. We begin 
 by accepting that tradition as a fact of social life ; not in any 
 spirit ot blind absolute subjection, but with the intention of 
 testing it. We test it by the permanent interests not of our 
 own poor transient life, but the life of the human race. We 
 find that these institutions, prejudices, and traditions are 
 inseparably bound up with the past life of Humanity ; that 
 they are necessary to her growth in the future. Therefore 
 they acquire for us a new sacredness. Their ultimate origin 
 it may, or it may not, be possible to discover. Further search 
 may throw partial light on them. Much of them may be 
 irretrievably lost in the abyss of pre-historic time. We accept 
 them, cherish them, perpetuate, and enlarge them. 
 
 This is the Positive answer. 
 
 Such, in a very few words, was the discovery made by 
 Auguste Comte sixty years ago : the discovery that all our 
 beliefs in every department of thought, passed, or tended to 
 pass through these three stages — theological, metaphysical, 
 and positive. The explanation of the present disorderly state 
 of society followed. He showed that on social and moral 
 subjects the process was not completed ; that some men were 
 reasoning on theological principles ; some on metaphysical 
 principles, some on positive principles. 
 
 Now the importance of this discovery was twofold. 
 
 First, it was the beginning of the science of Sociology. 
 It introduced for the first time into the affairs of human life 
 that sense of quiet firm conviction which men like Kepler, 
 Galileo, Newton, Bichat, Faraday, have been establishing 
 during the last three hundred years in the facts of nature 
 round us. In science you have a 'government of belief with- 
 out any tyrannical compulsion of it. Every one may go on 
 believing, if he chooses, that the earth is flat, and that the 
 sun moves round it. But as a matter of fact all people with 
 a smattering of education believe, and that against the 
 -evidence of their own senses, that -the earth is round, and 
 moves round the sun. And yet hardly one of these people, 
 
'^9 
 
 certainly not one in a hundred thousand, can go through the 
 proof of this behef. They take it on trust from mathema- 
 ticians and astronomers, and nobody thinks them irrational 
 for doing so. Now the discovery of Comte, of which I have 
 been speaking, was the first step towards bringing about this 
 quiet sense of scientific conviction in. social matters, which 
 has long ago been established in astronomical and physical 
 matters. 
 
 This was one result, and a most important and funda- 
 mental one. But there was also another, and one of quite 
 a distinct kind. 
 
 This discovery of a natural law of growth in human beliefs, 
 made it possible for the first time to sympathise fully and 
 deeply with the religions of the past ; to recognise the 
 immensity of our debt to them ; to feel our continuity with 
 them. It lies therefore at the very root of the religion of 
 Humanity. 
 
 I have heard people say, when talking about Positivism : 
 It is hard to ask me to believe that all the brave and devoted 
 men and women who have lived and worked and struggled in 
 the world until now have been all their lives acting under 
 delusions and false hopes. Is it now for the first time in all 
 these thousand years that men and women are beginning to. 
 have a glimpse of the truth on what concerns the highest 
 aims of our life ? We cannot believe it. You are asking us. 
 to break off utterly from our whole Past, and begin the 
 history of the world again. You ask too much. The sacrifice 
 is too painful. We abide by what we have received from our 
 fathers. 
 
 Now since the men and women who have such thoughts 
 as these are just those whose sympathy is the tenderest and 
 the widest, reaching as it does far back to those multitudes 
 whom they have never seen, and who have long ceased to 
 live, they should be answered, if there is an answer to give 
 them. 
 
 And mark, first, that these painful thoughts do not occur 
 now for the first time. They come with every great rehgious 
 change. The same question was asked by pious Pagans 
 when Christianity first came into the world. And Christian 
 teachers had no answer to give. Neither has the pure revolu- 
 tionary thinker any answer. I have heard one such speak of 
 the whole history of the Catholic Church as of a period in 
 which the human race was suffering from a pestilential fever, 
 and was only now beginning to recover. He who said this 
 was a man of singularly ardent and unselfish aspirations. 
 But his belief was as miserably narrow and mutilated as that 
 of the Christian of the third century burning Greek manu- 
 scripts and breaking- Greek statues. Every one who loves 
 
30 
 
 Shelley's poetry, and feels the lofty inspirations of love and 
 sympathy that kindled every page, must have been pained in 
 the same way by the fatal narrowness of a philosophic creed 
 which could see nothing in the religious leaders of bygone 
 ages but ambition, tyranny, and imposture. So eager was he 
 to fill the whole universe with his sympathy that his thoughts 
 reach back even to the time when the Earth was preparing 
 herself to become the dwelling-place of man. But to the past 
 history of man himself his revolutionary creed made him 
 utterly alien and hostile. 
 
 Now see how vast a change was contained in Comte's law 
 ■of Development. Instead of the hard angry antagonism 
 between the old and the new, which had risen up hitherto 
 whenever any new thought came into the world, all the 
 -creeds of the world were brought into harmonious union. 
 Things that seemed quite incompatible were shown to be 
 part of one and the same process. As in a stream winding 
 tortuously in a flat valley, one part seems to be travelling 
 from west to east, another part from east to west, but in 
 reality the water everywhere is travelling towards the sea, so 
 it is with the history of human faith. The founders of tl>e 
 great religions of the world put forward doctrines which 
 seemed utterly incompatible with each other. The Sky- 
 worship of Confucious, the divine multitudes of Hindoo and 
 Greek religions, the monotheisms of Moses, of St. Paul, and 
 of Mahomet, the revolutionary zeal of Voltaire and Shelley, 
 were no longer in deadly antagonism, no longer bandied 
 between them the harsh words, pagan, miscreant, bigot, 
 heretic, infidel, impostor. They were seen, -so far as their 
 upholders were sincere and true to themselves, to have been 
 working together by one and the same law of growth, towards 
 a common goal. The pious labours, the strenuous medita- 
 tions of Christian men and women in the dark ages were not 
 wasted, because their forms of thought, their modes of con- 
 ceiving the Highest, were other than ours. They have entered 
 into the growth of Humanity : we are what we are, partly 
 because of them. 
 
 And this is true, though it is harder to realise, even when 
 these different modes of faith exist side by side in the same 
 population, sometimes even in the same individual. The 
 very first application made by Comte of his law of Develop- 
 mei,t was to show that the anarchy of Western Europe, then 
 as now, was due to the incompleteness of the process of de- 
 velopment in different parts of the population ; so that, to 
 use his own technical language, the three methods of philoso- 
 phising — theological, metaphysical, and positive — were all 
 being employed at the same time. 
 
 Now the' very fact of analysing the complications of modern 
 
opinion in this way, of showing that the pain and suffering 
 was very often of that kind which belongs to incomplete 
 growth, was in itself likely to breed a patient, tolerant, for- 
 bearing spirit. For let us be very careful to remark this 
 point. If Comte had simply said. Here are these three 
 stages, theologic, metaphysic, and positive, and those who 
 have reached the third or second stage are in advance of 
 those who have reached the second or first, he might be 
 thought to he encouraging a spirit of arrogant intolerance 
 between the three. But what he showed was that different 
 subjects of thoughts were being treated on opposite methods, 
 sometimes by one and the same mind. Our own great 
 natural philosopher, Faraday, was- a positivist in matters re- 
 lating to electricity ; but in all that related to the spiritual 
 affairs of man he was content to remain in a purely theologic 
 stage of thought. Comte never for a moment encouraged 
 people to think that all theological thinkers were men of 
 feeble minds as compared with positive thinkers. Such a 
 mind as that of Cardinal Newman's would alone be sufficient 
 to refute such an idea, should anyone be tempted to put it 
 forward. But the fact is that Comte took pleasure in point- 
 ing out what important contributions to social philosophy 
 had been made by theological thinkers, and not merely by 
 St. Augustin, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernard, and Thomas 
 a Kempis, in the middle ages; but in our own century by 
 Chateaubriand, De Maistre, and other champions of Chris- 
 tianity against Voltairianism. He said to the scientific 
 world : So long as you confine your scientific researches to 
 the physical world around you, or to man's animal nature, so 
 long as you refuse to enter into the domain of the social and 
 moral nature of man, so long will the world refuse to regard 
 you as its spiritual leaders. For though the world wants 
 steam-engines and electric telegraphs, there are other things 
 which it wants yet more. It wants to be taught what to 
 believe, what to worship, what to hope ; how to act, how to 
 suffer. So long as your science declines to enter upon this 
 field, so long will it have to remain content with a very 
 secondary and subordinate place among the influences which 
 act on the European mind. 
 
 And to the theologians he said. You profess to occupy the 
 central field of human thought. You cannot, indeed, pre- 
 tend to put forward an all-embracing doctrine ; because on 
 questions of science, on questions of politics, on the practical 
 ordering of society, even on the education of the young, 
 people no longer listen to you. You defend certain funda- 
 mental traditions of morality without which society would 
 fall to pieces. For this we owe you our cordial and un- 
 feigned thanks. But is it not beginning to occur to you that 
 
32 
 
 the institutions which your doctrines defend are seriously 
 endangered by the decay of the defences ? that in its de- 
 fence of marriage, for instance, theology is in reality ex- 
 posing it to the attacks which were intended for itself ? Face 
 to face with Russian Nihilism, again, are honesty, truth, 
 chastity, respect for human life to be left with no other bul- 
 wark than yours ! 
 
 In order to make it perfectly clear what he meant by ap- 
 plying the scientific spirit to the study of society -and of man, 
 Comte devoted many years to a detailed arrangement of the 
 principal truths of each science, beginning with the simplest 
 truths, those of number and of space ; passing to the laws of 
 the physical world around us, the laws of heat, electricity, 
 chemical affinity, and so on ; thence to the laws of living 
 objects ; so preparing the way for the most complex of all 
 objects of study, that of society and of man. That he was 
 considered competent, even by those who did not accept all 
 his conclusions, to do such a work as this, is shown by the 
 fact that three of the greatest mathematicians of the day 
 (one of them the very greatest),* three of the greatest biolo- 
 gists, and the most illustrious of all naturalists, Alexander 
 Humboldt, attended the long and elaborate course of lectures 
 in which he went through these subjects, and which were 
 afterwards published as his " System of Positive Philo- 
 sophy." f The concluding half of this work is the application 
 of scientific method to human affairs. It contained the proof 
 that the development of what we call civilisation, our standard 
 of right and wrong, our conception of duty, were the result 
 not of supernatural revelation, but of the long arduous 
 struggles, generation after generation, of brave men and of 
 good women. They have been the growth of Humanity. 
 
 These then were the two results of Comte's great discovery 
 of the law of the three stages of human belief. First, the 
 extension of scientific law, of the conception of a definite 
 ascertainable order, to the fadls of human life, as opposed to 
 the arbitrary will of a supernatural Power. And,- secondly, 
 the sense of Continuity ; the proof that all the previous 
 struggles of men were not lost to us, that though the forms 
 of their belief might change from one generation to another, 
 yet that all, fetichist, polytheist, monotheist, atheist, had been 
 each in their own way working to one common end. Our 
 
 * Fourier. 
 
 t As . statements have been put forward leading some people to think 
 that Comte in his later years disavowed this earlier treatise, it is well to 
 remark that this is a complete error. In the preface to the third volume of 
 his "Positive Polity," he explains the necessity of studying his former 
 work. Le recours a mon premier travail devimt particuHerement indispensable- 
 envers le moiwement moderns, &c. Nor did he ever cease to speak of this, 
 work as his ouvrage fondamenta! . 
 
now perfe(5l state has grown from their labours. To look 
 upon ourselves as independent of them would be as insane as 
 for the blossom to assert its independence of root and branch. 
 All generations past, present, and to come, are joined 
 together in one common service. 
 
 The first twenty years of Comte's philosophical life, from 
 1822 to 1842, were devoted to the working out in detail of 
 this vast conception. Let it be noted that the word which 
 forms the principle subje(5t of my ledlure to-night. Religion, 
 was as yet not used by him. The thing is there indeed, but 
 not as yet the name. 
 
 The influence of a remarkable woman brought about the 
 crisis, which, though it changed neither the nature nor the 
 diredtion of his thoughts, yet gave them new intensity, and 
 a simpler and stronger form. It raised them from the obscure 
 recesses which only a few students of philosophy could enter, 
 into the open air of day, where from that time they have 
 become a living force in the world. Henceforth they have 
 become available for the service of all men and women, who, 
 ardently desiring to see and to share in the highest life, have 
 cast off the old faith without as yet seeing any way to the 
 new. 
 
 This Continuity, this working together of countless genera- 
 tions throughout the Past and the Future, this is what we 
 call Humanity. Here is the source of our highest Reverence 
 and our highest Hope. Here is to be found guidance for 
 each one of us in the efforts of our own short life. For that 
 life may either be spent in conflidl with humanity or in 
 union. It may be a life of rebellion, spent in weakening, so 
 far as one man can weaken it, some sacred tradition ; iu 
 spoiling the happiness, and thus thwarting the work, of good 
 men and women around him. Or it may be a life of indolent 
 self-seeking pleasure ; and whether such pleasure be of the 
 refined Epicurean sort, or be coarse and low, the life spent in 
 seeking it has to be maintained like other lives, by the labour 
 of others, and is therefore a burden upon them — not an organ 
 of Humanity, but rather a parasitic growth. Such lives as 
 these are in the truest sense irreligious lives. They are not 
 bound up with the life of Humanity. So far as in them lay, 
 they have hampered and retarded her growth. They are cast 
 out from her. 
 
 When we speak with pride and affedlion of England, we 
 mean all the hard and honest work — material, intelledlual, 
 and moral — that has gone on upon the soil of this island from 
 the earliest ages until now; ploughing, digging, reclaiming 
 of marshes, clearing of forests, toiling in seed-time and har- 
 vest, in the mine, and at the loom ; strenuous defence against 
 unprovoked attacks, wise labours of statesmen to make just 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 laws ; the brain work of her thinkers and poets and spiritual 
 teachers ; the lives of her mothers and daughters who have 
 maintained the standard of purity and of mercy. All this is 
 what we mean by England. We do not include in it all the 
 criminals, all the slothful, the greedy, the selfish, and the 
 unjust, whose lives have weighed down her destiny, have 
 been a drag upon the wheels of her progress. It is in spite 
 of sin, public and private ; in spite of many worthless lives 
 and many national crimes ; in spite of outrages and wrongs 
 in Ireland, in China, in India, in South Africa, that the 
 name of England still retains a hold on the respedl of men. 
 And so with Humanity. It is the triumph of good over evil 
 that is the objedt of our reverence ; and, to a conscience not 
 wholly seared, the strongest impulse to repentance for a life 
 selfishness will be the thought that, so far as in one man may 
 lie, he has hitherto not forwarded but has delayed that triumph. 
 
 I have said enough to show that the Religion of Humanity 
 is something very different from philanthropy, and very dif- 
 ferent from utilitarianism. The mere impulse of benevolence, 
 without thought or principle, will lead woefully astray. A 
 man is condemned to death for a foul and treacherous murder, 
 and the instinct of benevolence cries out for pardon. But 
 how if by your weak indulgence the sanctity of human life 
 be infringed, the sacred horror for treachery be lessened ? 
 These things are of far greater moment than to preserve a 
 life. To the condemned ' criminal himself the Positivist 
 teacher would say : The sole reparation by which the last 
 moments of your life may redeem the past is that you should 
 desire to die, to yield your life as a sacrifice, as a solemn 
 sacrament, by which loyalty and faith and hatred of foul 
 treason may be increased among men. 
 
 So, too, it is not by their seeming usefulness that doubtful 
 acts are to be judged. To tell a lie may be useful, to steal 
 may be useful, to violate every commandment of the Deca- 
 logue may be useful, on this occasion or on that. But how 
 if the sacredness of truth be tainted in yourself or in those 
 around you ? How if this standard of honesty and righteous 
 dealing be lowered ? What fleeting advantage would not 
 be purchased thus at infinitely too high a price ? 
 
 This, then, is the spirit in which the Religion of Humanity 
 deals with these elementary matters of right and wrong. Our 
 conscience is the precious gift to us of Humanity. Our rule 
 of right and wrong is the slow arduous achievement of thou- 
 sands of years of struggHng effort. Just as Capital, that great 
 instrument for the material advancement of man, is not the 
 product of any one man, nor of any one generation, but 
 results from the stored-up labour of successive generations ; 
 'ust as our science is not created by Isaac Newton, or by 
 
35 
 
 any other Englishman or Frenchman, but by Greeks and 
 Arabs and thinkers of many nations handing down the in- 
 <;reasing store from century to century ; so is it with that 
 infinitely more precious part of human wealth, that which 
 lies stored up in the consciences of men and women. 
 
 It is not our business to make a clean sweep of all the 
 ■existing rules of right and wrong, and to say. These are 
 bound up with all kinds of worn-out theological beliefs, 
 therefore we can have nothing to do with them : we must 
 start afresh, and begin again on the principles of Positive 
 science. As well might the modern astronomer decline all 
 aid from the observations of the astronomers of antiquity, 
 because they were based on a wrong notion of the position of 
 the earth in the solar system. As well might we pass by 
 ■with indifference the poems of Dante or of Homer, because 
 the Purgatory of the one, and the Olympus of the other, 
 have lost their terrors. We have all of us a large stock of 
 prejudices, that is of instinctive judgments, felt and expressed 
 without any long reasoning process. Well for us that we 
 have them. Rightly used, they are the most precious posses- 
 sions that we have. A young man once said to our philo- 
 sopher Coleridge, " I will believe nothing that I cannot 
 understand." "Then, Sir," was the reply, "your creed will 
 be the shortest of any that I know." If we want to find men 
 without prejudices, it is to the lowest of the savages that we 
 must go ; not to such tribes as the Zulus, who have shown 
 strong prejudices in favour of olaedience to their king and 
 fighting for their country, but to races far nearer to the apes 
 than they. There we shall find, no doubt, men stript of 
 many of the prejudices prevalent in Europe and Asia as to 
 honour, and loyalty, and truth, and chastity, and mercy. 
 
 These things are the slow creations of Humanity. It will 
 be the work of the Religion of Humanity to sift them from 
 the ore and the dross with which they are mixed up, and 
 which obscures their brightness, so that they may become 
 more precious to men than they have ever been. 
 
 Thus the chief business of the Religion of Humanity is to 
 gather together the noblest traditions of our race, to preserve 
 them, and to hand them down, a steadily increasing store, to 
 those that shall come after. Every one is to help in this 
 great work. The philosophic thinker has to trace back their 
 history, to show how they grew, to show how they have become 
 inseparably bound up with the life of Humanity. But before 
 we can reason scientifically about a subject we must know the 
 facts. We must observe the stars before we can reason about 
 their motions. Blind men cannpt observe the stars. And those 
 who are blind of heart cannot speak or think to any purpose 
 about things which the heart alone can reveal. It is vain to 
 
 D-2 
 
36 
 
 try and build up a philosophy of music, unless you have first 
 an ear for music. And so the spirit must be attuned, and 
 must be made sensitive to deeds and thoughts of mercy, arid 
 purity, and justice, before there can be any ranging of these 
 facts in their right relation to each other; that is, before 
 there can be any science of moral action. 
 
 Here it is that the subtle insight and the delicate con- 
 science of the best women will render in the future, as in the 
 past they have rendered, such inestimable service. The in- 
 stinctive choice of what is noble and pure, the instinctive re- 
 pulsion from what is base, are as needful for wise thought in 
 human conduct, as keen quick vision through a telescope. is to 
 him who would forecast the position of the moon or planets. 
 So, too, and in the same way, do the great poets and artists 
 contribute to the work. They raise us to that higher atmo- 
 sphere in which the noblest things become more clearly 
 visible to us ; they make the sense of the soul keen ; they 
 remove the blindness from our hearts, so that we may get to 
 know what the facts are on which our principles of right and 
 wrong action are to be based. 
 
 In what I have said I have not so much been attempting 
 to give a complete explanation of the Religion of Humanity, 
 as to show how it came, and how it deals with the facts that 
 lie at the deepest roots of human life. We are sometimes 
 asked, But what is your sanction ? If you can tell us nothing 
 about eternity, if you have no ultimate everlasting state of 
 punishment and reward to follow this short, fleeting life, 
 where is your test of right and wrong doing? Why kee:p 
 faith with your neighbour, and disappoint him not, though it 
 be to your own hindrance ? Why toil and till the ground for 
 harvests which you cannot hope to reap ? Let us eat. and 
 drink, for to-morrow we die. 
 
 Our answer is that the Religion of Humanity brings its 
 own sanction along with it. Does it give men and women, 
 rich and poor, learned and simple, enough to live for ? Does 
 it call forth all the powers of will, of thought, of sympathy ? 
 Does it answer to our deepest feelings of reverence and love ? 
 Does it satisfy our longings for ideal beauty ? Does it put 
 an end to the strife of intellect with feeling by disconnecting 
 our highest hopes from a framework of miraculous legend ? 
 Does it cease to taint the very source of righteous and un- 
 selfish action by the so-called sanctions of eternal happiness, 
 or eternal torture ? Does it supply a principle which can 
 keep the ancient laws of right and wrong unbroken ? Does 
 it give clear, definite teaching as to the path of duty, pointing 
 out to rich men the sinfulness of luxurious waste ? Does it 
 ennoble the life of workmen, not merely by a juster reparti- 
 tion of leisure and comfort, but by making them soldiers in 
 
an organised industrial army, whose purpose is to subdue the 
 powers of nature for wise human uses ? Does it kindle in rich 
 and poor alike a wholesome hatred for rotten and dishonest 
 work, raising them to due reverence for the beauty of the 
 Earth, so that forest and lake and ancient stones shall be again 
 sacred to us, as they were sacred to our earUest forefathers ? 
 
 If the Rehgion of Humanity helps us to subdue the paltry 
 criavings of human selfish passions by inspiring us with the 
 hope of working for such a prospect as this, we need ask for 
 no further sanction. It brings its own sanction with it. 
 
 I have dwelt principally on its applications to private life, 
 because these things lie at the root of man's conduct. They 
 must form the ultimate touchstone of every religion. Posi- 
 tivism does not create morality any more than Christianity 
 created morality. Honesty, chastity, mercy, truth, date back 
 from far beyond the Christian era. What Catholicism did 
 was to defend these precious possessions, and to enlarge 
 them by making them part of the doctrines and institutions 
 of the Church. For a very large and influential part of the 
 population of Europe those institutions have fallen into decay, 
 those doctrines have ceased to be credible. Positivism arises 
 to do the same work in a different way. Speaking to those, 
 and to those only, who cannot believe that the laws of right 
 and wrong were revealed once for all on a given hour and 
 day in a flame of fire from Mount Sinai, or that they have 
 any special and exclusive connection with miraculous events 
 stated to have taken place at Jerusalem, Positivism upholds 
 Humanity. They have grown with her growth. They are 
 inseparable from her life. 
 
 But let us now pass from private life to public. When 
 Cardinal Newman made his celebrated speech at Rome, 
 expressing unshaken confidence in the final triumph of the 
 Church over all the hostile influences of modern progress, it 
 occurred to some to ask, How does that Church deal with 
 such a fact as the Zulu war ? Here we see the whole forces 
 of the English nation bent upon the destruction of a barbarous 
 nation, whose sole crime is to have defended its independence. 
 There is a deep and wide consciousness throughout the nation 
 that we are guilty in this matter. Some of us feel as though 
 a personal taint had fallen upon them. Yet from the leaders 
 of the Christian Church, Catholic or Anglican, has come no 
 voice of reprobation, one only excepted, and that of suspected 
 orthodoxy, which has been ever raised on the side of justice 
 —the voice of Bishop Colenso.* 
 
 Now, had this instance stood alone, it would not have been 
 worth while to refer to it here. But it does not stand alone. 
 
 * Isendula, and what went before and after, were recent when this 
 Jecture was given. 
 
38 
 
 The dealings of the Christian world with the non- Christian 
 nations have been almost uniformly iniquitous from the first 
 ages until now. And the reason is obvious. It has been 
 impossible for a Christian statesman to sympathise with a 
 non-Christian creed. The reckless destruction of the ancient 
 civilisations of Peru and Mexico by the Spaniards of the 
 sixteenth century showed this. There were many good and 
 merciful men in the Spanish armies who deplored the avarice 
 and cruelty of their countrymen. But these men regarded 
 the Mexican and Peruvian worship as devil-worship ; there- 
 fore they oould feel no indignation at its destruction. It was 
 a repetition of what had been done to Greek temples and 
 Greek books in the early days of the triumph of Christianity. 
 Of Mohamedanism, the great rival of Catholicism, there is 
 no need to speak. There was an internecine war between 
 them in the middle ages, and we have seen the embers of 
 that war smouldering in the last three years. Protestantism 
 has been no whit superior to Catholicism in these things. 
 Our own action in India, in China, in Japan, has been always 
 tainted with the spirit of contemptuous dislike for a religion 
 and a civilisation which was not our own. 
 
 Never has there been a more striking example of this than 
 in the present South African war. Precisely the same unholy 
 alliance of commercial rapacity with religious zeal is taking 
 place there now which stained Spanish history three centuries- 
 ago. " The present war is a war of aggression," says one of 
 the correspondents of our newspapers, " begun by us under 
 circumstances which are only plausibly defended on the score 
 of expediency, and yet, strange to say, by a large section of 
 the missionaries as well as by a vast majority of the colonial 
 public it is looked upon as a 'jehad', or holy war, waged in the 
 interests of the spread of the Gospel, and, therefore, to be 
 
 sanctified bj' all the company of preachers Elderly 
 
 clergymen have taken the trouble to whet the popular cry for 
 revenge by declaiming in the colonial newspapers on the 
 enormities committed by the Zulus some forty years ago, and 
 one reverend gentleman goes so far as to proclaim in Natal,, 
 by placard and printed notice, that ' The Lord of Hosts is with 
 us ; the God of Jacob is on our side.' .... There can be 
 no doubt at all that in weighing the probability of future 
 troubles in South Africa the missionary and ecclesiastic 
 element must not be lost sight of."* 
 
 In contrast to this blind misunderstanding of all modes of 
 life that are not our own, this forceful imposition of our own 
 civilisation and our own belief on populations to whom they 
 are odious, Positivism brings before us the true Gospel of 
 
 * Daily News, May 7, 1879. 
 
Peace. There can be no sympathy between alien races 
 without clear understanding each of the other ; and Positivism 
 establishes that understanding. The African fetichist repre- 
 sents to us, not a degeneracy from a primeval perfection 
 caused by man's original fall and by his ignorance of the true 
 God, but the first stage in a long journey of upward progress, 
 along which we ourselves have already passed more quickly, 
 and through which it will be our business to guide others 
 whose development has been less rapid than our own. Till 
 we can do this, till Africa can receive Positivist missionaries 
 animated by sympathy springing from the sense of Continuity, 
 wisely guiding the spontaneous efforts of progress withoiit 
 wanton destruction of the established order ; till that time 
 can arrive, the best wish we can frame for Africa is that she 
 may be able to defend her independence, if need be, with the 
 best weapons that European science can supply, against the 
 unholy alliance of European greed and proselytism. 
 
 I refer to this particular instance, not merely for its 
 intrinsic importance and its urgency, but because it shows 
 the way in which Positivism meets the problems of public 
 life. To subordinate . politics to morals ; to recognise in the 
 public life of a nation what is recognised in the life of good 
 men, that power should be used for the benefit of others, not 
 for the aggrandisement of self, — this is our starting point ; 
 and up to this point we should, no doubt, get many good 
 , men of very various creeds to work along with us. But then 
 comes the question, How to act for the benefit of others ? 
 Granted that we have a national duty towards the Zulus, the 
 Hindoos, the Chinese, what precisely is that duty ? Here it 
 is that the distinctive principle of Positivism comes in, the 
 principle of Historical Growth, of Continuity. We repudiate 
 the notion that a great gulf is set between us and them by 
 the fact that certain articles of our faith are not of theirs. We 
 know that the life of Humanity arises from the working 
 together of a long series of generations. The fetich-wor- 
 shipping population of Africa represents one of the earlier 
 stages of social life through which we ourselves once passed. 
 We know that friendly sympathy and wise guidance might do 
 much to help on the natural process of growth, and enable 
 them to pass rapidly and without shock from their primitive 
 condition to a level with ourselves. We know at the same 
 time that a violent upsetting of their institutions, a sweeping 
 away their tenure of land, or their religious reverence for the 
 person of their king, — that most difiicult achievement in the 
 upward path of a savage tribe, — the claim that they shall strip 
 themselves of the means of self-defence, that they shall re- 
 volutionise their laws of rnarriage, that they shall tolerate: 
 amongst them the presence of men whose business it is to 
 
40 
 
 pour contempt on all the customs that they have held most 
 sacred, — we know that all this results in ruin and degrada- 
 tion, leaving behind it a disorganised and worthless mass, 
 lingering out the remainder of their days in mischievous 
 indolence. 
 
 There is not one of the great problems of our time on 
 which this principle of Continuity fails to shed a flood of 
 light. That is to say, there is no question of any kind 
 affecting man's life, whether it be our dealings with Eastern 
 and with savage nations, our intercourse with Western 
 Europe, the burning question of Socialism, the question of 
 education, of the position of women in modern life, of the 
 preservation of the moral law, — there is, I say, none of these 
 problems in which we have not first to see what is the Order 
 of Humanity, before we can make any wise efforts for Pro- 
 gress. The Order of Humanity exists, as we have seen, by 
 virtue of this Continuity ; by virtue of the working together 
 of all the generations that have succeeded one to another 
 from the earliest days until now. To whatever side of our 
 life we turn we find that the living are under the dominion 
 of the dead. We cannot utter the simplest thought or 
 feeling to one another without using words that were created 
 for us when the German, Latin, and Indian races were a 
 single tribe, feeding their flocks in the central plains of Asia. 
 Every moment of leisure that we spare from bread-winning 
 work is due to the hard labour of the countless masses who 
 have created human capital. Our science, our art, our 
 wealth, our language, our law, our morality, are none of them 
 our own. They come to us from a power outside us : they 
 are the creation and the free gift of Humanity. 
 
 When we see how entirely everything within us and 
 around us which separates us from the higher animals is due, 
 not to our own efforts, but to the great organism of which we 
 are the mere agents, all the loud talk of our time about the 
 rights of man or the rights of woman is hushed into silence. 
 Man, as an isolated independent being, has no existence 
 whatever, except as an imaginary mental abstraction ; unless 
 you can imagine the blossom living apart from the tree, or 
 the eye or the hand apart from the body. No doubt the agent 
 of Humanity, whether man or woman, must have a certain 
 free scope, otherwise his or her work cannot be done. There 
 must be adequate food and clothing, there must be sufficient 
 leisure for the higher energies of life, there must be a wide 
 margin of free choice to act in this way or in that, otherwise 
 the work cannot be well and worthily done. But the cry for 
 the absolute right to independence and freedom is like the 
 child's cry for the moon. The story that men were born 
 free and equal, turns out, when we look well into it, to 
 
be as incredible as the wildest fables that amused our 
 childhood. 
 
 This, then, is the doctrine round which we rally. Those 
 who receive it wiU find that it is in the truest sense of the 
 word a religious doctrine ; that is to say, that it touches the 
 three sides of life, thought, feeling, and action, and concen- 
 trates them on a common purpose. There is much religion 
 around us, very sincere and genuine as far as it goes, which 
 wholly fails to do this. It raises our feelings to another world, 
 and leaves our thoughts and our actions to do as well as they 
 can in this. Science, poetry, politics, remain outside it. It 
 is a shelter to which men and women betake themselves when 
 the confusion of modern life becomes too violent, and dreary, 
 and distracting. I speak of it with the profound respect and 
 sympathy which I feel : but a religion in which thought tends 
 ■one way, and feeling another, cannot be looked upon as per- 
 fect ; and we look forward to a more perfect religious state, 
 in which thought, feeling, and action shall have a common 
 aim. 
 
 Those who accept this central truth, who think that it 
 holds out the hope of bringing all the nations of the world one 
 day into religious union, will do well to begin by putting 
 themselves, so far as the difficulties of modern life allow, into 
 communication with each other. We who have addressed 
 you belong to a group of Positivists, whose central point is in 
 Paris, in the very house where Auguste Comte lived and 
 worked. In other parts of Europe, in America, North and 
 South, there are other groups also connected with the same 
 centre.* 
 
 Those who join must be ready to content themselves with 
 very modest results ; and to work on in the faith that they 
 are pireparing the way for a better future. The immediate 
 work, as I conceive it, is to make the word Humanity a reality 
 to ourselves and to those around us. It is with this view that 
 Comte prepared his calendar, in which every month, week, 
 and day in the year is consecrated to the memory of some one 
 among the illustrious men who have helped the common work 
 by moral inspiration, by philosophic thought, by wise prac- 
 tical endeavour. One of o,ur first objects, therefore, is to 
 make this calendar extremely familiar to us. If we are asked, 
 Is not Humanity a mere figment ? how does Humanity differ 
 
 * The leader of the movement, M. Pierre Laifitte, Comte's principal dis- 
 ciple, publishes every year a short chronicle of virhat has been done, which 
 is sent to all those who testify their general adhesion by subscribing a 
 sum, however small, towards the necessary expenditure connected with 
 propagation. Any one of us are ready to receive and transmit such sub- 
 scriptions. There is, also, for those who read French, a periodical called the 
 " Occidental Review," published every two months, in which Positivist 
 principles are applied to questions of the day as they arise. 
 
42 
 
 from any other theological or metaphysical abstraction ? our 
 answer is, Humanity is the assemblage of these noble lives ; 
 of these and of the countless multitude of those who have 
 laboured for the common weal without leaving any record of 
 their name. All that is good within us, all the good that we 
 enjoy, comes to us from these. 
 
 When these thoughts have sunk into our hearts and have 
 become part of the framework of our lives, they will become 
 the inspiring source of the poetry of the future ; which with 
 the sister-arts of music, colour, and form, is destined to react 
 hereafter on the life of man with a force which the highest 
 religion and the highest poetry of the past can but faintly 
 foreshadow. Yet such foreshadowing we thankfully accept. 
 We gaze with Dante at the mystic Rose, whose every petal 
 was a human life made pure from selfish earthly stain. And 
 as Dante* likened himself to a pilgrim coming southward 
 from the cold grey dusk of the polar region, who at the sight 
 of Rome and her lofty structures was struck dumb with awe 
 as the palace of the Lateran rose above the common things 
 around him ; so, said he, was I astounded when I passed 
 from human presence to the divine ; from the things of time 
 to the things of eternity ; from the people of Florence to a 
 people that was sound in mind and heart ; so, too, may we 
 take refuge from the sordid vulgarity and venomous passion 
 that stains the transient life around us, in gazing on the 
 glories that have been and that shall be hereafter. 
 
 Or, again, we may sing with Shelley the hymn of the 
 Earth Spirit, telling how Love penetrated her prirrieval 
 structure, and prepared her for becoming the dwelling place 
 of Humanity : — 
 
 It interpenetrates my granite mass, 
 
 Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass 
 Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers ; 
 
 Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread. 
 
 It wakes a life in the forgotten dead ; 
 They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers. 
 
 And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison 
 With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen 
 
 Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being ; 
 
 With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver 
 Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever, 
 
 Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing 
 
 Leave Man, who was a many-sided mirror 
 
 Which could distort to many a shape of error 
 This true fair world of things — a sea reflecting love : 
 
 Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven 
 
 Gliding o'er ocean smooth, serene, and even. 
 Darting from starry depths radiance and light, doth move ; 
 
 * Paradiso, Canto xxxi. 
 
43 
 
 Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left, 
 
 Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft 
 Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured ; 
 
 Then when it wanders home with rosy smile 
 
 Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile 
 It is a spirit, then weeps on her child restored. 
 
 Man, oh, not men ! a chain of linked thought. 
 
 Of love and might to be divided not. 
 Compelling the elements with adamantine stress ; 
 
 As the sun rules even with a tyrant's gaze 
 
 The unquiet republic of the maze 
 Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness. 
 
 Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, 
 
 Whose nature is its own divine control, 
 Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea- : 
 
 Familiar acts are beautiful through love ; 
 
 Labour and pain and grief, in life's green grove 
 Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be ! 
 
 His will, with all mean passions, bad delights. 
 
 And selfish cares, its trembling satellites, 
 A spirit ill to guide but mighty to obey. 
 
 Is as a tempest- winged ship, whose helm 
 
 Love rules, through waves \yhich dare not overwhelm,. 
 Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway. 
 
III. 
 
 POSITIVIST MOTTOES. 
 
POSITIVIST MOTTOES. 
 
 <i) Ordre et Progrfes. Order and Progress. 
 
 <2) L'amour pour principe, The principle, Love, 
 
 L'ordre pour base, The foundation, order, 
 
 Le progrfes pour but. The end, progress. 
 
 ^3) Le progrSs est le developpement de l'ordre. 
 Progress is the development of order. 
 
 (4) Entre I'homme et le monde il faut I'Humanite. 
 Between the World and Man, we need Humanity. 
 
 (5) Savoir, pour prevoir, afin de pourvoir. 
 
 Vision brings prevision ; thus enables provision. 
 
 (6) Agir par affection, et penser pour agir. 
 
 Action from impulse springs ; thought guides the act. 
 
 (7) L'esprit doit fetre le ministre du coeur; et jamais son 
 
 esclave. 
 The intellect should be the servant of the heart ; never 
 its slave. 
 
 (8) Induire pour ddduire, afin de construire. 
 Induction first, then Deduction ; finally Construction. 
 
 (g) Pour compl6ter les lois, il faut des volontes. 
 Laws to fulfil, needs human will. 
 
 (10) Reorganiser sans dieu ni roi, pa/ le culte syst6matique de 
 
 l'Humanit6. 
 Reorganisation without God or King, by systematic devo- 
 tion to Humanity. 
 
 (11) Devouement des forts aux faibles : ven6ration des faibles 
 
 pour les forts. 
 Devotion of the strong to the weak : veneration of the weak 
 for the strong. 
 
 (la) Conciliant en fait ; inflexible en principe. 
 ConciUate in act ; in principle be firm. 
 
 ^13) II n'existe point de societe sans gouvernement. 
 No society can exist without government. 
 47 
 
48 
 
 (i4) Aucune soci^te ne peut se conserver et se developper sans 
 un sacerdoce quelconque 
 No society can maintain and develop itself without some 
 kind of priesthood. 
 
 (15) La richesse est sociale dans sa source, et doit I'fetre aussi 
 
 dans son application. 
 Wealth is social in its source, and should be used for social 
 purposes. 
 
 (16) Nul n'a droit qu'a faire son devoir. 
 A man's only right is to do his duty. 
 
 (17) Vivre pour autrui. Live for others. 
 
 (18) Vivre au grand jour. Live openly. 
 
 (19) La soumission est la base du perfectionnement. 
 The beginning of moral progress is submission. 
 
 (zo) L'homme devient de plus en plus religieux. 
 
 Man tends to become more and more religious. 
 
 POSITIVIST MOTTOES.* 
 
 All the greatest thoughts that have come into, the world 
 may be put, if we think well about them, into very simple 
 words. In following them out into detail, in building up 
 systems with them, in applying them to this and the other 
 complicated problem, the use of simple language is of course 
 less easy, and straining of the mental powers becomes neces- 
 sary. Not so with the thoughts themselves. 
 
 Take for instance tKe thought that lies at the root of the 
 higher mathematics, on which the infinitesimal calculus of 
 Leibnitz and Newton is founded. Here is a thought com- 
 monly supposed to be singularly inaccessible to ordinary 
 minds unversed in mathematical questions, yet the essential 
 thought which pervades the whole is not at all difficult to 
 grasp. 
 
 The earliest geometers of Greece had shown us how to 
 measure surfaces bounded by straight lines, triangles, squares, 
 hexagons, octagons, and so on. But when this early geometry 
 was applied to the measuring of real things, men saw that it 
 failed them. Most real things are not bounded wholly by 
 straight lines, but partly by curved lines. A leaf, a shell, 
 the body of an animal, the trunk of a tree, the heavenly 
 bodies, are all more or less round ; are bounded by lines 
 
 * A more complete list of Comte's sayings and quotations has been 
 drawn up by Mr. C. Higginsou, and is to be obtained at Newton Hall, and 
 at Messrs. Reeves and Turner. 
 
49 
 
 whose direction is infinitely variable. Therefore the great 
 problem of geometry was how to measure these infinitely 
 variable lines. The ancient geometers succeeded in doing 
 this in the case of the simplest curved line, the circle, by 
 comparing it with straight-lined figures placed outside it and 
 inside it, and by observing that the greater the number of 
 sides in these figures, the closer you got to the shape of the 
 circle itself. A hexagon was nearer the mark than a triangle,. 
 a twelve-sided figure than a hexagon, and so on. Archimedes 
 doubled the number of sides of these figures till he got to 
 figures of ninety-six sides, which came very near indeed to 
 the shape of the circle, far surpassing the finest purposes of 
 practical measurement. . If we suppose the number of sides 
 infinite, the figure would be actually identical with the circle. 
 Meanwhile, short of infinity, the difference between the 
 figure and the circle can be made as small as we please. 
 
 Now, the whole spirit of the higher mathematics lies in 
 this fitting on of straight lines to curved lines, and seeing 
 what the proportion of the one to the other tends to become, 
 as you go on making the straight line shorter and shorter. 
 On this simple and elementary thought it is that the whole 
 of what are called transcendental mathematics are based : 
 it is thus that mathematical science becomes competent in 
 some slight degree to measure the infinitely varying forces 
 of nature. The thought itself, though to create it demanded 
 the highest power of the greatest minds, yet when created 
 becomes accessible to the humblest and the simplest. 
 
 Now the same truth holds good of other subjects. The 
 facts of the human soul, the activities — to use other language 
 — of the human brain, are very much more intricate, their 
 laws, the paths they follow, are very much more difficult to 
 grasp and to estimate, than the measurement of the curved 
 surface of a leaf, or than the tracing of the path of a planet 
 through the sky. Nevertheless, the great central thoughts 
 which the most highly inspired prophets and teachers of our 
 race have from time to time revealed to their fellow-men, are 
 always clothed in a few very simple words that all men may 
 understand. What follows from them, — how to apply them 
 to the intricate problems of life^this is a matter for the 
 deepest meditation and the highest wisdom : but the thoughts 
 themselves are transparent as crystal ; the ways in which 
 they are to do their work among men may be a secret ; but 
 the secret is open for all who care to read it. 
 
 Auguste Comte has given his thoughts to the world in 
 fourteen or fifteen volumes. But he has also condensed the 
 most important of them into as many sentences. And it 
 may profit us, at the close of a course of lectures, to dwell 
 upon a few of these sentences. They may serve to recall to 
 
 E 
 
50 
 
 us in a vivid way the teaching of our Master, and to enable 
 us to grasp the whole of it in a way which, in its more 
 detailed form, would have been impossible. 
 
 Let us take in the first place the motto, Order and Progress, 
 and try to unfold a few of the thoughts condensed into those 
 three words. 
 
 At first sight the meaning seems to lie on the surface, and 
 not to go very deeply below it. It strikes us as a political 
 maxim, of a kind specially calculated to find favour with 
 Englishmen. We pride ourselves upon understanding better 
 than other nations how to make political changes gradually ; 
 preserving the old, and grafting the new upon it. Orderly 
 progress, so we flatter ourselves, is the one striking feature of 
 English political history. 
 
 Now that there is some truth in this cannot be denied. 
 True, at least, it is that the changes in the machinery of 
 government have been more gradual with us than elsewhere. 
 True, that there is with us, as there was with the Romans, a 
 strong disinclination to change outward forms, even when 
 nothing remains of the old substance. The empire established 
 itself in Rome before the people knew : — the old republican 
 names of consul and tribune and senate went on for centuries. 
 So in England. democratic government has been gradually in- 
 stituted under the forms of monarchy. 
 
 But the words. Order and Progress, have a deeper mean- 
 ing than this. The forms and institutions of government are 
 but one aspect, and not the most important aspect, of our 
 social life. While monarchy and the two Houses of Parlia- 
 ment remain to all appearances much the same as they were 
 a century or even two centuries ago, changed in detail, but 
 carried on from one generation to another continuously, and 
 Tvithout a break, the essential changes in the structure of 
 society in England have been vast and rapid beyond all 
 parallel in history. A hundred years ago England was an 
 agricultural nation : with thriving commercial and manufac- 
 turing centres no doubt, but stiU well-balanced between these 
 different forms of industry; the tillers of the soil being, as 
 they should be, numerically preponderant. The large mass 
 of the English nation lived in small towns and country villages. 
 A hundred years ago the great cities of Lancashire and York- 
 shire and Staffordshire were country towns of moderate size, 
 and London had the population that Liverpool has now. 
 Four-fifths of London has been built during the last hundred 
 years. More than half of the popula.tiqjn now live in large 
 towns, not in country villages. 
 
 This has been our Progress ; and who can say that such 
 Progress has been orderly ? London in a hundred years has 
 increased from half a million to four millions. It covers 120 
 
SI 
 
 square miles. The greater part of this vast area is a labyrinth 
 •of courts, blind alleys, and mean streets, unrelieved by verdure 
 or by any sign of national dignity. Its government is a chaos 
 of local boards and vestries, with small desire or capacity for 
 concerted action.* Who can look on Progress of this kind 
 with pride or satisfaction ? 
 
 It is very evident, therefore, that the word Order means 
 something more than the order of the policeman's baton ; and 
 that Progress means more than activity and movement and 
 growth. When a tumour forms within the body there is often 
 enormously rapid growth. Every minute fresh cells are 
 forming, and from day to day the increase of size can be 
 noted. But this is not Progress ; or it is progress downwards. 
 
 Before going further, let us penetrate more closely into the 
 meaning of the word Order. And first let us see what it implies 
 in matters less complicated than human affairs. As applied 
 to the facts of astronomy, for instance — what does it mean ? 
 The Order of the bodies of the solar system is that cycle of 
 changes which go on repeating themselves in fixed ways ; the 
 rotation and the revolution of the earth and of the planets ; 
 the slow displacement of the earth's axis which occasions the 
 precession of the equinoxes ; that other motion due to the 
 influence of the'moon that we call nutation : these and other 
 facts of the same kind make up what we call the Order of 
 the heavens ; that part of the heavens which most immedi- 
 ately concerns us, the solar system. 
 
 Here there is no Progress ; no room, that is to say, for 
 man's modifying action. The Order is wholly above and 
 beyond man's reach ; and our part is only to submit, to adapt 
 ourselves to it, to organise our life in accordance with it. 
 How intimately our life is thus bound up with it appears at 
 once, if we think of our measures of time : of the day, of the 
 year ; of our physical dependence on climate ; of the recur- 
 ring cycles of vegetation. But in this part of the order of 
 the world our duty is limited to resignation and adaptation. 
 
 When we come to the activities of matter upon our planet, 
 we find an Order capable of being modified by the interven- 
 tion of man. The forces of gravity, heat, electricity, chemical 
 affinity, can be turned to account by us. By placing masses 
 of matter animated by special activities in suitable adjust- 
 ment to each other, results follow which we can foresee and 
 which are profitable to us. Vapour expanded by heat can be 
 enclosed in iron cases, and its elasticity utilised ; electrical 
 forces can be gufded along paths made for them by wires ; 
 hard clods can be broken up, and their chemical activities 
 set free for action on the seed-corn : and so on. Here, then, 
 we have Progress : i.e., a setting free of human activity ; and 
 * This lecture was given in 1880. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 
 
 this Progress depends upon a previous study of the corre- 
 sponding Order. We have to study the laws of weight, the 
 laws of heat, the laws of electricity, the laws of chemical 
 affinity ; that is to say, the Order pervading the material 
 world, before we can have Progress ; before human activity 
 can effect any result. Our study of this physical Order may 
 be instinctive and empirical, as with the first labourers who 
 tilled the soil ; or it may be abstract and theoretical, as with 
 the men of science who direct our great engineering enter- 
 prises ; but knowledge of the Order there must be. If 
 the seed be sown at the wrong season, or on a soil unfilled, 
 no crop will follow. If electricity be sent through material 
 which is non-conducting, no current will flow. 
 
 Here, then, throughout this vast range of human affairs, 
 we see clearly enough the connection between Order and 
 Progress. It is expressed in the third motto on our Hst : 
 Progress is the Development of Order. The activities of matter 
 follow their course : man's intervention consists in arranging 
 them in ways that turn to his advantage. 
 
 If from the Order of inorganic nature we turn to the 
 Order of organic life, we find activities still more complex, 
 and still more amenable to man's intervention. Vast fields 
 of man's activity — the cultivation of plants, the breeding of 
 cattle, the maintenance of public health, the cure of disease 
 — depend on prior knowledge of the Order of the organic 
 world, of the laws of Life. Observation of that Order, con- 
 formity to those laws, is evidently here, too, the first condition 
 of Progress. 
 
 Ascending now to a still more complex range of facts, we 
 see some of the higher races of animals living together in 
 the social state, and, in the case of man, handing through 
 generations habits and institutions under which the young 
 are trained and moulded. Here, too, as in the case of the 
 individual Life, there is a natural Order : an order of healthy 
 existence and of healthy growth. And to the laws of this 
 Order, all Progress that has been real, all efforts, that is to 
 say, of man that have effected any useful change, have 
 conformed unconsciously. But there has been no conscious 
 recognition of this Order until Auguste Comte began his 
 philosophical career. Glimpses of the truth appeared in the 
 writings of Kant, Turgot, and Condorcet ; but Comte it was 
 who for the first time systematically' explained to the world 
 the existence of a natural order in social phenomena, analogous 
 to the Order recognised in the phenomena of Astronomy and 
 of Biology. 
 
 Now, the disorderly activity of France and of England 
 during the last hundred years (to concentrate our attention 
 on these two countries for a moment), is due to the fact that 
 
53 
 
 the instinctive prejudices which held society together broke 
 down before this new conception of the natural order in 
 social matters could obtain general recognition. The only 
 doctrine which has had any practical influence in England 
 till quite lately, has been the doctrine of the earlier economists, 
 which taught that Society as a whole had no business to 
 interfere in matters of commerce and industry; that indi- 
 viduals should be left entirely to their own unfettered action, 
 buying in the cheapest market, selling in the dearest ; that 
 human labour was a commodity of commerce ; that all 
 attempts to moderate the disturbance caused by the intro- 
 duction of machinery, to regulate the hours of labour, to 
 check the employment of women and children, were so many 
 checks upon commerce — were in flat defiance of free trade 
 and of the laws of nature. 
 
 The blind belief in this crude and imperfect doctrine has 
 led us wofuUy astray. To it we owe the dangerously one- 
 sided development of English life of which I was just now 
 speaking. To it we owe modern London, and the hideous 
 brick encampments of Lancashire and the Black Country ; 
 incubi of the most perilous sort which we know not how to 
 deal with. If it be possible to conceive of Progress without 
 Order, here we have it. Anarchical activity is the fitter name. 
 
 A wise and large conception of the Social Order, had that 
 been possible fifty or a hundred years ago, would have guided 
 us very differently. We should have seen that the enormous 
 social revolution involved in the displacement of hand-labour 
 by the steam engine and the spinning-frame, needed to be 
 carried on slowly, and with a due regard to the vested 
 interests of the labourers themselves ; unless it was to work 
 infinite misery and degradation. The unavoidable conver- 
 sion of a rural population into a city population would have 
 been carried on with due regard to public health; large spaces 
 would have been set apart for air and exercise, and civilised 
 enjoyment ; the building of hundreds of thousands of new 
 dwellings would not have been abandoned to the unchecked 
 rapacity of fraudulent or ignorant speculators : much of the 
 work done, at infinite sacrifice of friendly feeling, by trade 
 unions in checking the oppressive exercise of the power of the 
 capitalist, would have been anticipated by wise intervention 
 of public opinion : in one word, the activity of modern 
 industry would have been an orderly progress instead of 
 turbulent confusion, tending too often downwards and back- 
 wards, not forwards and upwards. 
 
 In France things went rather differently. There they had 
 not the steam engine ; and the doctrines of free trade, and of 
 leaving industry to take care of itself, were less popular. But 
 they had Voltaire and the Revolution. They had an utter decay 
 
54 
 
 of the old faith : they had noble aspirations for founding a new- 
 society on principle of human justice : aspirations which, 
 make the Revolution an era in man's history. But there, too, 
 the doctrine of Social Order was deplorably imperfect. The 
 rights of man, and the sovereignty of the people, and the 
 regeneration of mankind by universal suffrage, furnished a 
 most meagre and unstable basis for any wise Social action. 
 Therefore, the Revolution in its first movement was a failure. 
 The revival or the galvanisation into artificial life of the old 
 system became inevitable, if only to show men what the 
 problems were that had to be dealt with. The old Catholic 
 system had guided men, had taught them where they stood 
 in the world, and what their duty was. Some new system 
 was urgently needed, which, by demonstrating the natural 
 order of Society, could lead men to a sense of their position 
 and their duty, in free obedience and adjustment to this 
 order. Such a system is presented to us in the teaching of 
 Auguste Comte. His survey of the facts of the social state, 
 as seen in successive generations, has shown us what are the 
 permanent elements and institutions : what are the elements 
 that undergo change, and what is the law by which those 
 changes are regulated. On the basis of his teaching, the 
 ideal of the Revolution, organisation of human life in a just 
 way without superstition of any kind, becomes possible to 
 realise. The Voltairian revolution was based on a theory of 
 Social Order from which all reverence was utterly shut out. 
 So necessary is reverence, admiration, the sense of ideal 
 grandeur, to human life, that rather than lose it, men turned 
 back to ancient beliefs, which they knew in their inmost 
 thoughts to be dead. The result was that on the one side 
 there was Progress without Order, on the other side Order 
 without Progress. And this is what we see going on now 
 in the struggle between Clericalism and Radicalism through- 
 out Europe. Auguste Comte, by his large conception of the 
 human Order, by his extension of the Positive spirit to the 
 highest and deepest facts of man's spiritual life, by showing 
 that veneration for the highest heroism and saintliness in the 
 past, aspiration and striving for the most ideal grandeur in 
 the future, are in the truest sense positive, real, and scientific, 
 needing the aid of no chimerical belief to foster them, has 
 shown to men the true way tp reconcile Order and Progress. 
 Love for the best that lies near us, the readiness to receive 
 and cherish the highest that rises round and above us in the 
 past or future : this is the inspiring principle ; recognition of 
 the laws that regulate man's moral and social life, this is the 
 basis ; practical effort to guide our own life and the lives of 
 others into closer accordance with those laws, this is the 
 ultimate end to strive for. Progress for us is the develop- 
 
55 
 
 ment of Order ; it is order rendered with every generation 
 more and more perfect. 
 
 I have dwelt at some length on the three mottoes relating 
 to Order and Progress, in order to show, though in a very 
 inadequate and imperfect way, what a vast mass of positive: 
 truth is condensed in these two or three words. I shall pass 
 moire rapidly over some that follow, without tryitag to cover 
 the whole Ust that I have brought before your notice. 
 
 I take that which stands fourth on the list, and which, at 
 first sight, is less easy to understand : 
 
 Entre I'homme ei le monde ilfaut I'HumaniU. 
 
 Between Man and the World we need Humanity. 
 Let us try to understand this. It is abundantly clear to every 
 one with the humblest smattering of physical science that the 
 problems of human nature have much to do with man'a 
 animal structure and organisation. Man is obviously in struc- 
 ture, in limbs and organs, one of the higher vertebrate- 
 animals. His hand, his foot, his erect stature, his large brain, 
 are very important points of difference between him and other 
 animals, but evidently do not remove him out of the range of 
 animality. 
 
 It was not astonishing, therefore, that the naturalists of 
 the last century should spend much time and pains in investi- 
 gating how it was that these points of difference brought man 
 to his evident condition of preponderance over other animals; 
 should try to explain how man's higher nature was the result 
 of his higher organisation. Nevertheless, they failed entirely 
 in making their explanation good. The poems of Shakespeare, 
 and the discoveries of Newton or Galileo, were not to be 
 accounted for by the structure of the human hand, or even by 
 the anatomy of the nervous system. Therefore, the road was 
 left open for the old metaphysical and theological assertions, 
 that the difference between man and other animals lay in the 
 immortal soul, which the one had and the others had not. 
 
 Now what Comte made clear was that the distinction 
 between man and the animals was not to be accounted for by 
 a crude inspection of man's animal structure. It was far too 
 great for this. And yet, on the other hand, it was quite 
 unnecessary to frame suppositions as to the soul which no one 
 could prove or bring to the test. The distinction was to be 
 explained by the fact that man had for countless generations 
 lived on the planet in the social state ; handing down the 
 results of social action from one generation to another. If we 
 place ourselves back in imagination at a sufficiently remote 
 point in the history of our planet, we have every reason to 
 suppose that we should find the huinan tribe not specially 
 distinguished in intellectual attributes from others of the 
 higher vertebrates. Without language, other than the ele^-^ 
 
56 
 
 mentary form of it, which dogs, apes, and the other social 
 races possess, without the invention of fire, without tools, man 
 would not have seemed to an observer, who should have 
 visited our planet at such a time, quite certain of success in 
 his competition with other races of animals who were also 
 capable, like him, of living in societies, and whose natural 
 weapons of offence and defence might be superior. 
 
 In such a condition of competition between the rival social 
 races, a very httle would sufi&ce to turn the balance. Evidently 
 the race that- was to be victorious must be one of the social 
 races. The carnivorous animals, living in solitude, could not 
 combine their activities sufficiently. Evidently, also, there 
 could be only one race of animals establishing societies over 
 very large areas, since conflicts would arise in which the 
 weaker of the two societies would be shattered, and the 
 animals composing it would be driven back into the lower 
 form of animal life. We may suppose long-continued conflicts 
 between the race of men and other animal races before the 
 victory was assured. In deciding this conflict, all the 
 influences of external and material nature come into full play. 
 The facts of climate, of soil, of man's physical organisation — 
 all that Comte sums up in the word. World — are here of 
 paramount importance. But the conflict once decided, and 
 Humanity established as the sovereign race, a new order 
 begins. Traditions begin ; the elements of a permanent 
 articulate language are slowly built up, as men learn more 
 and more to work together with sustained activity. A little 
 freedom is left to the emotions, and to thought, after the 
 grossest material wants have been satisfied. The germs of 
 decorative art, of song — inspired by wrath, or joy, or grief — 
 begin to show themselves : fear and love engender religious 
 awe. Under these influences, which accumulate very slowly 
 at first, but which grow steadily stronger with time, each 
 child of each new generation grows up and is moulded. Here, 
 then, lies the power which has lifted Man so far above the 
 animals around him. These issue forth directly from external 
 nature : are born to satisfy nature's wants and then to die. 
 But Man, as we know him, the European, Asiatic, even 
 African man, is the creation of Humanity. Between him 
 and the blind forces of the outer world lie tools, fire, language, 
 animals trained to his service, soil cleared and tilled ; accu- 
 mulated stores of food, clothing, and lodging ; above all, a 
 brain filled with thoughts, traditions, and imaginations due 
 to the long continuance of social activity through countless 
 generations. In one word. Between the world and man, there 
 stands Humanity. 
 
 I pass to three other mottoes, which I will consider 
 together. They are the fifth, sixth, and seventh on the list. 
 
57 
 
 Savoir pour prtvoiv afin de pourvoir. 
 
 Vision brings prevision, and thus helps provision. 
 
 Agir par affection et penser pour agir. 
 
 Act from affection, think in order to act. 
 
 L'esprit doit itre k ministre du cceur, et jamais son esclave. 
 
 The intellect should be the servant of the heart, but never 
 its slave. 
 
 All these expressions deal in one way or another with the 
 right employment of man's intellectual forces. Comte has 
 been accused — strangely enough, as I think — §L wishing to 
 ■exercise a cramping effect on the intellect ; of wishing to 
 •discourage new discovery, and to limit our enquiries to 
 matters of obvious and immediate utility. Perhaps nothing 
 lias done more to prejudice the reception of Comte's teaching 
 with cultivated men, than the belief, wholly erroneous though 
 it be, that his principles are discouraging to the free exercise 
 ■of man's intellectual powers. 
 
 The earliest thoughts of man, like the thoughts of animals, 
 were dictated by urgent material wants. The bird or beast 
 use their senses to detect objects or movements which they 
 Jinow by experience to be connected with the gratification of 
 appetite or the avoidance of danger. In these matters many 
 ■of them show skill, keenness of perception, and power of 
 putting two and two together, which equal or surpass man's 
 powers. The knowledge which a rook has gained, as to 
 whether a man that it sees in the distance carries, or does not 
 carry, a gun, is but a common and inferior instance of the 
 powers of animals to obtain and make use of such knowledge 
 as concerns them. Those who are familiar with that admir- 
 able book, " Leroy's Letters on Animals "* — where the every- 
 day intellectual life of animals is described by a practised 
 naturalist of profound philosophic insight — will remember 
 ■countless instances of the same kind, or rather will have 
 watched countless instances for themselves in animals with 
 which they are familiar. In these cases, the truth of Comte's 
 motto is evident enough. 
 
 Affection prompts the act which thought must guide. Affection 
 is taken here in its broadest sense, including every natural 
 impulse whatever : the impulse of self-love and self-preserva- 
 tion ; the impulse of sexual love ; the impulse of the mother 
 tQ protect her young ; the impulse of anger, and so on. The 
 animal does not see or listen to things which have no relation 
 to his life ; he sees, in order to foresee, with a view to taking 
 action. Thought, Desire, Activity : this is the threefold 
 
 * It may be remarked that this -work, to -which the attention of English 
 readers has very recently been called by Mr. Romanes, -was placed by 
 •Comte, more than forty years ago in the small collection of books of general 
 interest known as the Positivist Library. 
 
58 
 
 division of man's moral nature. Since, then, animals and 
 men think under the impulse of desire, it follows that the 
 breadth and scope of thought depend entirely upon the range 
 of our affections and desires. We think upon such matters 
 as we care for. What, then, do we care for ? Animals care 
 for the preservation of their lives and of their young, and for 
 the hunting of their prey ; and they think well on these 
 matters. Man, in his early stages, does the same. In 
 tracing an enemy's track, the savage observes footsteps, 
 and broken biS3,nches, and other signs of the kind ; and reasons 
 from what he observes with a keenness which no modern 
 man of science can rival. But this range of his desires is 
 limited ; therefore thought is limited. And so urgent is the 
 claim of hunger, and of other animal needs, that it is very 
 long before the products of past labours (what we call 
 Capital) are stored up in sufficient quantity to set a Uttle 
 intellectual force free for other things. So soon as this 
 is the case, we have the germs of art and of song ; and the 
 geniuses of the tribe study the qualities of plants, and the 
 ways of animals, and the path of the moon and planets, and 
 the effect of all these things on man's life. But all these 
 studies have their root in an enlarged range of emotion. Men 
 begin to fear all these forces of nature round them ; and in 
 their fear of these they study them, or at least revere the 
 medicine-man of the tribe, who is specially set apart for 
 studying them. 
 
 It is easy to follow this thought out through the whole of 
 history. The architecture and literature of Egypt, the songs 
 of the Vedas, all of them have their root in desire : an intense 
 yearning for friendship with the gods, the powers which 
 regulate man's life. 
 
 Nor when the belief in the gods began to break down, and 
 the Greek philosophers began to speculate upon the origin of 
 things, and on the measurement of space, do I see any funda- 
 mental difference. Not less than the medicine-men of an. 
 African tribe were the Greek geometers inspired by strong 
 desire : the sense of the urgent need of knowing something 
 of the forces which pressed upon man's life. Man has to live 
 in the world : the world is round ; how are we to measure it ? 
 To Pythagoras assuredly, to Plato and to Aristotle not less 
 certainly, the establishment of scientific certainty, in a world 
 where all belief was tottering to decay, was in itself an object 
 of the highest and deepest desire. We should misconceive 
 and misjudge these Greek men of science utterly, if we wera 
 to suppose that all these speculations in geometry and natural 
 history were indulged in simply as men might amuse them- 
 selves with chess-problems, or as a piece of intellectual 
 athletics. 
 
59 
 
 Since then the range of thought is co-extensive with the- 
 range of emotion, the question with which we started, Does 
 Positivism hamper the free exercise of our intellectual 
 powers ? changes itself into other questions. Does Posi- 
 tivism narrow the range of our emotions and sympathies ? 
 Does it give us less to care for ? And this issue, as I think, 
 cannot be for a moment doubtful. Positivism has immensely- 
 widened the range of our sympathies. It has thrown open- 
 new fields of thought, the very existence of which had hardly 
 been suspected. Let me mention the first and greatest of all 
 these — the history of Humanity. By inspiring the sense 
 that the life of man is dominated in every part by the life of 
 Humanity, the strongest impulses are kindled to study the 
 growth and progress of Humanity from the first ages till, 
 now ; and thus to gain the deepest insight into her future^ 
 And it need hardly be said, in a Positivist meeting, that the 
 history of Humanity includes more than most historians 
 include. Not merely battle and conquest, and systems of 
 law and government, but every scientific discovery, every 
 industrial invention, every great creation of poet, painter, or 
 sculptor, every school of moral and religious teaching — all 
 these find their place as parts of the great power on which, 
 our destinies depend. The history of mathematical discovery,, 
 as of every other science, is part of the history of man. So 
 is the history of industrial invention. So is the history of 
 art. So is the history of morality. 
 
 And besides this, by enlisting our sympathies for Order 
 and Progress in the full implication of those words, Positivism 
 has opened the vastest field which it is possible to conceive 
 for the exercise of intellectual power. Let it be remembered 
 that the word Science, as hitherto understood by our RoyaL 
 Societies, and other learned academies, has had but a very 
 limited range compared with that which Positivism assigns 
 to it. It has embraced Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, 
 Chemistry, and Biology, and has then stopped short. The 
 result of Comte's teaching has been to add two sciences 
 to the list — the Science of the Social State, Sociology, and 
 the final Science of Ethics — dealing with Man as modified by 
 the Social State. Mr. Spencer, who has borrowed,* with slight 
 modification, Comte's conception of the order of the sciences, 
 has made Sociology a more familiar word in England than it 
 would have been otherwise. But no one has contested to 
 whom the foutidation of the science is due. 
 
 All that Positivism claims from the man whose life is 
 devoted to speculation is simply that he should not fall below 
 
 * I do not, of course, refer here to Mr. Spencer's pamphlet on ' ' The Clas- 
 sification of the Sciences," but to the arrangement so lucidlyset forth in the 
 preface to his " Synthetic Philosophy." 
 
6o 
 
 the moral standard expected from every other citizen. He 
 should remember that the leisure which enables him to 
 speculate has been created for him, not by his own effort, 
 but by the hard manual labour of other men in the present 
 and in the past. He should feel responsible for the exercise 
 of his powers, just as the capitalist should feel responsible 
 for the exercise of his wealth. In one word, he, like other 
 men, is required to be a servant of Humanity. But this 
 being once said, his service is left absolutely free. 
 
 This is what is meant by the sajring, the Intellect should 
 be the servant of the heart. And now what of the other 
 half of the sentence, the Intellect should not be its slave ? 
 There are many ways in which this may happen. Thought 
 may be subservient to any of the self-seeking impulses, the 
 love of gain, the love of power, the love of praise. And 
 just to the extent that this is so, it is warped from the straight 
 ■course. It is in the position no longer of a judge, but of the 
 barrister holding a brief and arguing on one side. That is 
 one way in which the intellect may be enslaved : it may 
 follow the leading of the heart's selfish impulses. 
 
 But there is another and a nobler way, though leading 
 also to inevitable disaster. It has happened before now 
 that a system of society has been founded upon, and held 
 together by, a very poor and imperfect doctrine. When 
 this is the case, all that is noblest in man, his love for 
 his fellow-men, his reverence for the communion of the 
 past with the present, his well-grounded fears lest, by disrup- 
 tion of the social state, each man may be left to the action of 
 his own selfish impulses ; all these noble sympathies urge him 
 to the defence of the doctrine which holds society together ; 
 though but for the action of these emotions, were he judging 
 in cold blood, he would see clearly enough how untenable 
 the doctrine was. He becomes, in spite of himself, a special 
 pleader. His intellect is the slave of his heart. If instances 
 are wanted, the whole history of the Christian Church for 
 eighteen hundred centuries supplies them in abundance. 
 No one can contest for a moment the intellectual power of 
 St. Augustine, of St. Bernard, of Dante. Yet St. Augus- 
 tine believed the Christian mysteries, because they were 
 unbelievable. St. Bernard bent the whole force of his 
 intellect to set aside, on social grounds instinctively felt, 
 the rationalism of his opponent Abailard ; and Dante be- 
 lieved, though not without a fierce struggle, in the eternity 
 of hell. The whole doctrine of monotheism, involving the 
 •enormous paradox of an omnipotent and all-wise creator, 
 foreseeing and permitting evil, was a stumbling-block to the 
 intellect, incomparably greater than any in the old Poly- 
 theistic faith. Nothing but the temporary connection of this 
 
6i 
 
 faith with the moral regeneration of mankind could have 
 made it possible for great and powerful intellects to have 
 lent themselves to the support of such a doctrine. But they 
 werp nobly inconsistent. The logic of feeling swayed them ; 
 and they bent the whole -forces of their mind to find argu- 
 ments in support of a doctrine against which, but for the 
 social fabric inseparably bound up with it, they would have 
 indignantly revolted. And as the social value of the 
 Catholic Church grew gradually less, without yet wholly 
 disappearing, and without the hope of any substitute for it 
 as yet dawning on the horizon, terrible must have been the 
 inward struggle whether to join, or to withstand, the insur- 
 rection of the intellect against the claims of the heart which 
 had become intolerably tyrannous. In the last hours of such 
 a struggle many of us have stood. 
 
 I pass now to a class of mottoes which deal more directly 
 with man's practical action. Positivism is essentially prac- 
 tical throughout. It is a philosophy; it would be nothing 
 were it not a philosophy : that is, it takes a speculative view 
 of all the most general relations of man and the world. But 
 it is also, and not less essentially, a polity, therein differing 
 from other philosophical systems. The central point of its 
 speculative system is man's conduct. 
 
 Induire pour deduire, afin de construire. * 
 
 Induction first, then Deduction ; finally Construction. 
 The saying is unacceptable to those who think knowledge for 
 the sake of knowledge to be the highest aim ; but it indicates 
 that, between uncontrolled inquisitiveness on the one hand, 
 and narrow utilitarianism on the other, there lies what ancient 
 writers have called Edification ; the building up of man's 
 thoughts, feelings, and energies into a coherent whole. 
 
 I pass, then, to the ninth motto : 
 
 Pour computer les lois, il faut des volontes. 
 Laws to fulfil, needs human will. 
 
 Now there are some thinkers of our time and some students 
 of positive philosophy whom this motto scandalises. We 
 thought, they say, it was a cardinal principle of positive 
 philosophy that every phenomenon whatsoever, from the fall 
 of a stone to the subtlest operations of man's brain, was sub- 
 ject to law. What do you want, then, with your human will 
 coming in to complete a law ? 
 
 Let us think a little what a law of nature is. It is simply 
 a human thing. It is man's perception of certain general and 
 uniform facts that go on amidst a mass of apparently discord- 
 ant and irregular facts. In astronomy, when we look from 
 the earth upon the movements of the planets and the moon, 
 their movements seem at first sight wholly irregular ; then 
 
62 
 
 ■certain regularities are perceived in them : finally, all their 
 movements are seen to be in accordance with the general 
 facts, or laws, discovered by Kepler and Newton. But 
 astronomy is the only science of which we can say thus much. 
 In all other sciences the irregularities which we cannot as yet 
 explain, are much more numerous than the regular tendencies 
 which we call laws. We do not know why gold is yellow, why 
 a certain kind of iron ore tends to attract iron, and to range 
 itself parallel with the earth's axis, to take two instances from 
 ten thousand. The Ust of unknown things becomes far greater 
 as we mount from dead to living matter. There are laws of life, 
 imdoubtedly ; that is, there are certain general facts to which 
 all the other facts conform. There is the law of growth, the 
 law of death, the law of reproduction, the law of habit, and 
 others of the same kind. But these are very far from explain- 
 ing all the myriad incidents in the life of a plant, much less 
 of an animal. We have to learn these like unscientific 
 people, from practical observation, believing that, as we know 
 more, we shall be more able to bring them under the scope of 
 scientific laws ; believing that to a being endowed with much 
 higher faculties than our own, much that is obscure to us 
 would be intelligible to them : but never for a moment in- 
 dulging in the dream that we shall explain everything. 
 
 Now in this spirit we approach the facts of human nature. 
 Common sense and philosophy alike show us two things : 
 first, that man's life is subject to a great number of general 
 conditions of all sorts, which we call laws, physical, social, 
 and moral ; and secondly, that we have a certain power, by 
 r,o means of an unlimited kind, of modifying these conditions; 
 ■of weakening some, and of intensifying others. A man who 
 knows himself to be bom with a strong innate hereditary ten- 
 dency to anger, for instance, can place himself under such 
 influences that this tendency shall be moderated, even though 
 it never disappear. In short, we have a certain modifying 
 and controlling power over our own actions and character, 
 and over those of other men. Our consciousness of free will 
 is a fact, explain it how we may. It may be, and is, a very 
 deceptive consciousness, but it corresponds to a real fact. 
 
 No doubt it may be said that a being of vastly superior 
 powers, a god for instance, watching the works of man, might 
 foresee and foretell every action, as we foretell the place of the 
 moon fifty years hence. Very possibly : but it is desir- 
 able for us now and then to reflect that we are not gods, but 
 men. We have to deal with the facts of human life, with our 
 limited human faculties. We have to exercise what powers 
 we have in the best way possible ; and we have to keep con- 
 stantly in mind that we cannot jump off our own shadow by 
 any effort that we can make. Let us, therefore, simply 
 
63 
 
 recognise the fact that we have a certain measure of spon- 
 taneity, of free will or power of modifying our conditions ; 
 and that we had better use this in accordance with the laws of 
 natural development, than in blind antagonism to them. 
 
 The next mottoes, (lo) to (i6), indicate the general purpose 
 of Positivist action. To re-organize human life without the 
 aid of fictitious beliefs of any kind, political or theological, 
 guided only by the consideration of what is best in the perma- 
 nent interests of humanity : this is the task for the present and 
 for the next ensuing generations. To establish a social state, 
 throughout the planet on which we live, founded on justice ; 
 to maintain the ancient sanctity of truth and loyalty and 
 duty ; to strive that human life may become again simple and 
 beautiful, purging itself of the hideous slough of our modern 
 industrial civilisation, and clothing itself with something of 
 the loveliness of Greek life when Apollo's temple stood at 
 Delos, or of Indian life when the Vedic poems were sung ; 
 this, and no less than this, is the goal of our efforts. 
 
 Two mottoes, (ii) and (12), indicate the general spirit in 
 which the work of re-organization should go on. The first 
 explains itself, and needs but little comment, except, perhaps, 
 the remark that there is no concession made by Comte to the 
 levelling spirit. There will be weak and strong amongst men 
 to the end of time ; and each has duties towards the other. 
 Loyalty to the true leaders of men, frank recognition of their 
 superiority, unpoisoned by envy, is as necessary now as it was 
 in the days of belief in divine right. 
 
 Then follows a motto (12) : 
 
 Conciliate in act : in principle be firm — 
 a thought specially necessary to those whose principles and 
 theories of life may be superior to those of their fellow men, 
 and who, nevertheless, have constantly to keep their eyes open 
 to the practical nobleness that is found along with poor prin- 
 ciples, and the poor and feeble practice that too often accom- 
 panies the loftiest ideals. The respect for practical instinctive 
 empirical wisdom and goodness, rising superior to all defects 
 of principle, runs through every part of Comte's teaching, 
 and is what penetrates it with such reality and moral fervour. 
 This motto is peculiarly important to Positivists in dealing 
 with contemporaries of other religious and political creeds. 
 
 Mottoes 13 and 14 show how entirely emancipated Comte 
 was from the democratic shibboleths of our times : supersti- 
 tions at least as hurtful as any that are connected with 
 theology. 
 
 Self-government, sovereignty of the people, and expressions 
 of the like kind, flattering to the vanity of men, find no place 
 here. Be the form of political constitution what it may, 
 those who live under it have to submit to the decision of a 
 
64 
 
 will that is not their own, that often widely differs from their 
 own, if they wish to continue in the social state at all. Frank 
 recognition of this fact would save us very much trouble. 
 
 And so with the other great factor in the social state — 
 public opinion — which modifies the governing power, and 
 assigns certain broad lines within which it must move. This 
 public opinion must have persons to expound it — to be its 
 mouthpiece. Sometimes these persons form an organized 
 priesthood, in times when religious belief is settled; some- 
 times they are prophets, poets, men of letters, editors of news- 
 papers, public orators. But some kind of spiritual leadership 
 there must be if the society is to hold together and to grow. 
 And it would seem that the healthy constitution and sound 
 basis of this spiritual leadership has more to do with the well- 
 being of the social state than any other of the conditions 
 that affect it. Who can estimate the waste of human effort, 
 the paralysis of activity, in times like these, due to the 
 absence of firm, stable convictions applied to the events of 
 public and private life by men competent so to apply them ? 
 
 The great practical problem of modern life, which is dis- 
 tracting every European society, and which, in all probability, 
 will torment and perplex them yet more keenly before it is 
 solved, is evidently the problem of Labour and Capital — of 
 the Distribution of Wealth. All kinds of political mechanisms 
 are devised, and will long continue to be devised, for the 
 solution of this problem : the Nihilistic solution o'f sweeping 
 everything away and beginning again ; the German Socialist 
 solution of constituting the State a vast co-operative society, 
 distributing the products of labour equally; and countless 
 others. Those who have gone deepest into the matter are 
 well aware that none of these solutions do more than skim 
 the surface of things — doing even this at the risk of wasteful 
 and disorderly conflict. No solution is real that does not 
 rely on moral agencies springing from transformed convic- 
 tions. And the one essential conviction which Positivism 
 seeks to implant is this : 
 
 (15) Wealth was created by social action, and should be 
 applied to social ends. 
 
 Capital is the stored-up labour of past generations, to 
 which the labour of the present has also contributed its rela- 
 tively small quota. Neither employers nor workmen have any 
 moral right to deal with it as though it were their own : they 
 are the joint agents for its use — maintaining themselves from 
 it with due moderation, and handing it down to their suc- 
 cessors, increased rather than diminished. Not until this 
 truth has become part and parcel of the general conscience 
 of mankind can the Labour and Capital question receive its 
 solution. 
 
65 
 
 Both here and throughout, the exercise of all power what- 
 soever, the power of wealth or the power of intellect, is con- 
 trolled by the general principle — 
 
 (i6) A man's only right is to do his duty. 
 Observe that Positivism, while disregarding the doctrine o£ 
 Rights in general, as being very hazy and hard to define, 
 does distinctly reserve this one right — that of doing duty. 
 This means more than is commonly understood. The slave 
 acting under compulsion is incapable of duty in the true 
 sense, which implies freedom and responsibility. This motto 
 implicitly, therefore, condemns all slavery ; not merely the 
 slavery of legal bondage, but that which too (frequently results 
 from our modern industrial life, when men are pinned down 
 to toil so narrow as to degrade their faculties, so ill rewarded 
 as to concentrate all thought on the relief of hunger and 
 thirst, so arduous as to leave no leisure for reasonable service 
 of mankind. Under such conditions men cannot be said to 
 possess this one sacred right of doing their duty. 
 
 And if we ask what man's duty is, we find it summed 
 up in the simplest and strongest words in the two maxims 
 (17) and (18)— 
 
 Live for others. 
 Live openly. 
 Vivre au grand jour. — Live in the face of day. Live so that 
 there should be no cause of shame though all men should see 
 the life. What free air is to the purity of the blood, such is 
 simplicity and frankness to the moral life. 
 
 Both of this and of the maxim that precedes it has been 
 said that they are not new — that they are as old as Chris- 
 tianity. Surely they are so ; or rather they are very far 
 older. Auguste Comte did not invent conscience or duty 
 any more than St. Paul or Jesus invented them. Far deeper 
 in the past do their roots lie. I read precepts of truth 
 and mercy in the Psalms of David, in the hieroglyphics of 
 Egyptian tombs in the poems handed down on the lips of 
 Brahmins through a hundred and fifty generations. All that 
 Comte has done has been to reinforce them ; to readjust them 
 to the changed conditions of our modern life. 
 
 The words. Live for Others, have been compared with the 
 older maxim. Love thy neighbour as thyself. It is a little 
 different, and, as we think, more real and practical. To love 
 is not altogether within our own power. There are some that 
 we may love better than ourselves; but towards the mass of. 
 mankind it is probable that few of us will ever experience any 
 personal affection of this kind. But action lies within our 
 power. It is possible for us, and it is incumbent upon us, so 
 to guide our life that the main current of it shall be concen- 
 trated on the service of others. 
 
66 
 
 (ig) The beginning of moral progress is Submision. 
 On this maxim Comte sets great store; and perhaps it pene- 
 trates more deeply than any other into the heart of his teach- 
 ing. To him, as to Mahomet, Resignation, recognition of the 
 limiting necessities of life, is the first condition of effective 
 energy. By obeying the laws of Nature, we at last mould 
 her to our service. In learning, we begin by faith in previous 
 stores of knowledge. Unless the stand be taken on established 
 order, attempts at progress are but vain beatings of the air. 
 
 We come then to the last motto on our list (20) : 
 
 L'homme devient de plus en plus rdigieux. 
 
 Man tends to become more and more religious. 
 This has been called a glaring paradox. And so it may well 
 seem to those who look only at the anarchy of thought and of 
 work now prevailing, and who see nothing beyond. But if 
 Religion is that state in which every faculty is concentrated 
 on a common purpose which shall set each one of us free 
 from conflict within himself, and render him fittest to work in 
 harmony with others, then would it not be a true measure of 
 the progress of man to examine how far such a religious spirit 
 prevailed : and can we conceive of any mode of religious life 
 more likely to attain that end — more able to reconcile the 
 heart with the reason, and the reason with the practical 
 activities of life, and less liable to the fatal antagonisms by 
 which rival creeds have neutralised their benefits — than the 
 religion of Humanity ? 
 
IV. 
 
 THE BICENTENARY ,0F 
 CALDERON. 
 
 ■F 2 
 
THE BICENTENARY OF CALDERON. 
 
 It is one of the distinguishing features of Positivism that it 
 claims to introduce no fundamentally new principle; it does 
 but promote and regulate spontaneous forces already existing. 
 What Comte did, what, in fact, has been done consciously or 
 otherwise by all great sociaL renovators, was to bring promi- 
 nently forward certain deep natural tendencies, to rescue 
 them from baser elements, and to give them systematic 
 form. 
 
 A striking example of this procedure is his view which, at 
 first hearing, seems so strange a paradox, of the affinity be- 
 tween Positivism and Fetichism. Yet on closer inspection it 
 is seen that the renewal, widely changed and exalted, of those 
 simple feelings of reverence, and awe, and love, called forth by-^ 
 inanimate objects in the world around us, is a tendency which 
 has increased in modern times, and which is still increasing. 
 All modern poetry, all modern art, bears witness to it. The 
 affectionate care for animals, the love of flowers, the craving 
 for solitude among the woods and mountains, the clinging 
 affection for old buildings, I might add for old creeds also, 
 even after reason has rejected them — these things are nearer 
 akin than most of us are aware to the nature-worship of 
 primaeval races of men. 
 
 Now this stong current of thought and feeling was fully 
 recognised by Comte. The affinity between Fetichism and 
 Positivism is one of the most impressive and fertile concep- 
 tions of his philosophy. For to the Positivist the word 
 Fetichism calls up something besides wild pagan ceremonies, 
 or antiquarian treatises on folk-lore. It includes the poetry 
 of Wordsworth, and the painting of Turner. 
 
 Closely connected with this matter is another very striking 
 tendency of our time : the honour paid to great men of the 
 past on the anniversaries of their birth and their death 
 
 * This discourse was given in the rooms of the Positivist Society, New- 
 ton Hall, Fetter Lane, on May 29, 1881. 
 
 69 
 
70 
 
 Consider it closely, you will find that the desire to know 
 every detail in the life of a great poet, or a great statesman, 
 the reverence for the house where Shakespeare or Michael 
 Angelo was born, or for the tomb of Dante, spring from 
 the same root as the Fetichist love of outward" nature which, 
 counts for so much as a spiritual influence in modern life. 
 Our reverence and love flow over from animate to inanimate 
 things. They become sacred to us. Even what might seem 
 at first sight a mere shadow and abstraction, the fact that 
 after a number of revolutions of the earth in her orbit, fixed 
 not by any natural law but by a purely human arrange- 
 ment at one hundred, we should pay special honour to the 
 date of a great man's birth ; this, as indeed the celebra- 
 tion of birthdays and other anniversaries, shows how 
 natural it is for even abstract things and institutions like the 
 Calendar, of man's devising, to be clothed with affection and 
 reverence. 
 
 Be this as it may, the modern movement towards the 
 revival of centenaries is in full accordance with every aim of 
 Positivism. We should be slothful and sullen indeed did we 
 hold aloof from it. We are striving to do in a more thorough 
 and systematic way what is done outside us on a far larger 
 scale no doubt, and with the prestige of literary applause, 
 but irregularly, capriciously, and far too seldom. We wel- 
 come these outbursts of public enthusiasm, whether it be 
 for the memory of Dante, or of Moliere, of Mozart, or of 
 Shakespeare. That such beauty and genuine feeling should 
 be possible is the deepest encouragement to us. For our aim 
 is not to create anything afresh : it is simply to extend and 
 systematise these feelings ; to bring them into closer contact 
 with the every-day life of men. In a word, we would revive 
 these glorious memories once a year, not once a century. We 
 would free them from any trammels of narrow nationality, if 
 any there be, that still cling to them. And, finally, we 
 would stamp a deeper meaning into these revivals by showing 
 how each great life has played its own proper part in the - 
 vast drama of Humanity. 
 
 This last point it is that specially distinguishes the cele- 
 brations of great men that take place under the inspiration of 
 Positivist teaching from an ordinary biographical notice. We 
 do what others do, but we try to do it more systematically : 
 that is, with greater precision and greater reality. Our 
 endeavour is to look at each great life relatively to its 
 social environment : in simpler words, relatively to the place it 
 occupies in history. Life, whether of a plant, bird, or man, 
 is the interaction, the adjustment, of organism and environ- 
 ment. And for a great man the environment includes all the 
 influences of his country and his century. 
 
71 
 
 Now, Calderonwasa Spanish nobleman. He was born at 
 Madrid in 1601. His genius was recognised by Philip IV., 
 under whose protection he mixed in the great world of his 
 time as a soldier and diplomatist, while sedulously practising 
 his dramatic art. At the age of fifty he, like the other great 
 Spanish dramatist. Lope de Vega, became a priest. For 
 thirty years he wrote religious dramas, of which more after- 
 wards. He died on Whit-Sunday, the 25th of May, 1681. 
 The house in which he died is still standing : and last week 
 half a million of peopl'e came from every part of Spain and 
 Europe to see it. We need not think that the age of 
 pilgrimages is past. Perhaps it is only just beginning. 
 
 To-day a few Positivists, of very varied nationality, in 
 Rio Janeiro, in Paris, in Rouen, in Stockholm, and here in 
 London, are meeting together for the same cause. Outside 
 Spain and the regions where the peninsular language is 
 spoken, I do not know that any other commemoration of this 
 great poet has been held ; for men are slow as yet to over- 
 step the limits of nationality. And yet one of the principal 
 reasons why I am speaking here to-day is that Calderon was 
 a Spaniard ; and that it seems well that Englishmen should 
 teach themselves how to pay due honour to the Spanish 
 •nation. Therefore I begin with a few remarks, first on the 
 nation of Calderon, and secondly on his century. Knowing 
 the environment, we shall better understand the life. 
 
 The five populations which, broadly speaking, make up 
 what, dating from the time of Charlemagne, may be called 
 the commonwealth of Western Europe, were arranged by 
 Auguste Comte in a certain order of value. His views as to 
 that order underwent a striking change in the course of his 
 life. This at least shows how difficult and how important 
 the problem seemed to him. Briefly the change consisted in 
 this. In the Philosophic Positive the arrangement was as 
 follows : France, Italy, Germany, England, Spain. The 
 final arrangement was this : France, Italy, Spain, England, 
 Germany. 
 
 Without discussing the general question of this order, 
 which would take us too far, one or two points will help to 
 explain the subject immediately before us. 
 
 I. By this order of arrangement, Comte meant to give his 
 opinion not as to which nation had produced the greatest 
 number of remarkable men, but which was best prepared, as 
 a whole, for undergoing the social regeneration which he 
 called Positivism. His appreciation of England, for instance, 
 is sufficiently shown by the sixty-six English names which he 
 introduced into his Positive Calendar. And he never failed 
 to acknowledge the existence in England of a small minority 
 
72 
 
 who were likely to take the initiative in the regenerating 
 movement, and to sustain its first efforts. But this is widely 
 different from saying that the whole mass of the English 
 nation were well prepared for the movement. And looking 
 at England as a whole, Comte thought that some of those 
 things which have made her so important in the world were 
 not hkely to help, but on the contrary were quite sure to 
 hinder, the moral and social elevation of the great mass of 
 her people. 
 
 II. Why was Italy placed second ? For several 'reasons: — 
 
 1. Her very weakness was an advantage, morally and 
 socially. It made her more willing to receive European 
 influences, less inclined to absorption in thoughts of national 
 aggrandisement . 
 
 2. That weakness was due to the temporal power of 
 the Pope ; and the very miseries which this anomalous insti- 
 tution brought upon Italy stimulated strong desires for social 
 renovation. 
 
 3. To have kept clear of the moral and intellectual dis- 
 turbances caused by Protestantism was, in Comte's view, a 
 great advantage for a nation, even though it might have 
 checked for the time the growth of great men. Politi- 
 cally speaking, the most valuable aspect of Catholicism 
 was the conception of a spiritual power making its real force 
 felt ; equalling and surpassing the temporal power in prestige. 
 To live in a country where a priest, the son of poor peasants, 
 could hold his head as high as the richest . banker or the 
 oldest duke, was, socially speaking, an immense advantage to 
 the great mass of the people. It saved them from coarse 
 and vulgar admiration of worldly success. No conquests of 
 India, no inventions of power-looms, and steam engines, and 
 telegraphs, no overflowings of populations into thriving 
 colonies, could, in his eyes, compensate such an advantage 
 as this. It has been well said that vulgarity is one of the 
 forms of death. To this danger, at least, populations like the 
 Italian and Spanish, by the very fact of being behind others 
 in industrial progress, and consequently less keen in the 
 modern scramble for wealth, are assuredly less liable. 
 
 4. And finally, the sense of artistic beauty, the love for 
 poetry, music, and other arts, has been more widely dis- 
 seminated in the mass of the Italian people than in any 
 other. It is not a question of whether the schools of art now 
 prevailing are good ; we know that they have fallen, of late 
 years, far short of those of Northern Europe. For our present 
 purpose, it is less important to think of the cultivated few, 
 than of the wide diffusion of artistic sensibility through the 
 mass. In England there are exquisite connoisseurs of music 
 
73 
 
 and painting among our aristocratic and professional classes. 
 We think Beethoven a greater genius than Rossini ; we are 
 probably right ; but we should not forget that Rossini wrote 
 an opera for every little town that he passed through; and 
 that would hardly be possible in Shropshire or Suffolk. 
 
 III. Why was so high a place given to Spain ? 
 
 Partly for the same reasons that applied to Italy. The 
 Spaniard — like the Italian, like the Irishman, if you will, or 
 the Pole, or the Tyrolese — was saved from cringing to noble 
 birth, or high place, or vast wealth, by seeing the parish 
 priest hold his own with the village squire. The bishop of 
 his diocese — a peasant, perhaps, by birth^took precedence of 
 the bluest blood in Spain : the Pope was supreme over kings. 
 Let us grant that the continuance of Catholicism in Spain, 
 .as in other countries, retarded the growth of science, and 
 made her slower to accept the steam engine with its attendant 
 blessings. Let us admit that great intellects rose less easily 
 into prominence. Yet always" this is to be put into the other 
 scale. The nation, as a whole, has been saved from the 
 deadening vice of vulgarity ; it has not stooped so low as 
 ■others to the worship of rank and wealth. 
 
 Add to this another advantage peculiar to Spain. 
 
 The Spanish nation had been knit together, as no other 
 nation had been knit, by a common danger. While Norman 
 was trampling on Saxon, and treading in the seeds of social 
 antipathies that even yet have not been rooted from our soil, 
 prince and pea.sant in the Asturian mountains were in the 
 full swing of their long struggle for the recovery of their 
 land from the Moor. The whole history of Spain till modern 
 times lies there. One can hear the sound of the pibroch* 
 in the old law latin of their earliest statutes, when at the 
 cry of danger townsmen and herdsmen were bid to rally 
 from market-place or mountain round the common standard. 
 Footmen in such cases were of more avail than horsemen, 
 and they knew their worth. The deepest sources of caste 
 -hatred were drained away. Such an education in loyalty, 
 fraternity and independence, it has fallen to the lot of no 
 civilised nation to receive'. Loyalty to the king was stretched 
 to the limits of oriental adulation ; but let the king try to 
 infringe the charter, or to exact a rate in aid that had not 
 been voted — the answer was decisive. The orders of his 
 majesty are to be " obeyed, but not executed." The plain 
 farmer of Zalamea, if he be mayor of his township, will stand 
 to the king in person, and do summary justice on his own 
 •officers, if need be. The meanest beggar, says an English 
 
 * See extract from Fueros of Jaca, quoted in Hallam's " Middle Ages," 
 -ch. iv. 
 
74 
 
 traveller* who knew the Spanish people singularly well, holds 
 his head high in Spain. Alms may be refused, but he is never 
 treated with contumely. 
 
 Such is the nation which defied Buonaparte when all the 
 rest of continental Europe was cowering under his heel. With- 
 out the immense advantages of wealth and insular position that 
 England enjoyed, misgoverned, deserted by her governing 
 classes, — her peasantry defied the most scientific machinery 
 of war that the world had seen ; and from that time Buona- 
 partism was doomed. Guerilla is a Spanish word. This was 
 the country of Calderon ; and these were the reasons which 
 led Comte to place that nation so high. In great discoveries, 
 in large applications of scientific industry, in mercantile enter- 
 prise Spain is far behind-hand ; but the lee-way can be 
 made up more easily in these thirtgs than in some from which 
 other nations suffer. Such defects cannot weigh down the 
 balance when the union of brotherhood with personal dignity, 
 the highest ideal of human life, is set in the opposing scale. 
 
 From the country of Calderon I pass to his century. 
 It was the century of the Thirty Years' War. Calde- 
 ron was eighteen years old when this war began ; he 
 was in maturity of life when it ended. The treaty of West- 
 phalia marks the moment when the two great forms of 
 Christianity gave up their rival hopes of European supre- 
 macy, and accepted the limits which they held then, and 
 which they still retain. Germany, Holland, Sweden, Britain, 
 are Protestant still ; Austria, France, Spain, Italy, are 
 Catholic, though the word Catholic from that time lost its 
 meaning. The hope of universality was gone. 
 
 Still, there was a breathing time ; the deadly internecine 
 strife was over ; and for a hundred years, until the first blasts 
 of the Revolutionary storm warned men of far greater changes 
 yet to come, — till the middle of the eighteenth century, — 
 there was peace. It was a time singularly favourable for the 
 grander forms of poetry. After the fierce activity of religious 
 war had stirred thought to its depths, the need for action 
 suddenly ceased, and there was leisure for clothing strong 
 public emotions in ideal forms. It is surely by no accident 
 that we have at one and the same time Milton idealising 
 Protestantism in England, Calderon idealising Catholicism in 
 Spain, while Corneille, in France, chose his subjects from 
 the course of Roman history, down to the point when it 
 passes into modern life. 
 
 The apparition of great poets is no mystical or miraculous, 
 fact. Like every other fact of human nature or of society, 
 it is the result of fixed laws — ascertainable with some degree 
 
 * George Borrow. 
 
75 
 
 of certainty, though, doubtless, never ascertainable with 
 precision. Some of the elements in the case are worth 
 considering. 
 
 All the three aspects of Logic, in Comte's large accepta- 
 tion of the word, are concerned in Poetry : the Logic, 
 of FeeUng, the Logic of Images, and the Logic of Signs. 
 There must first be Passion ; strong emotions of Love or 
 Antipathy called out by certain things or persons. This is- 
 the fetichistic element in Poetry, the groundwork of the 
 whole. Here is the Logic of feeling. There must, in the- 
 second place, be the power of vividly portraying the image 
 of those things or persons, in such sort as to leave out all 
 that is unmeaning and indiflferent, and to dwell only on the 
 striking and salient features abstracted fronr. the rest, and often 
 made stronger and more intense; the transformation thus 
 wrought being often so great that the image portrayed cor- 
 responds to nothing found in nature, being purely ideal, yet 
 none the less resting on fact. This is the Logic of Images^ 
 And finally, there must be some clear statement, in speech 
 of the ordinary kind, connecting these passions and images 
 together. This is the Logic of Signs, the only kind to which 
 the word has commonly been applied. 
 
 This applies to Poetry of every sort. Now it follows 
 from this that the two forms of Poetry which appeal to the 
 general mass of mankind, dramatic and epic, require three 
 corresponding conditions. The emotions which lie at the 
 root of the whole must be felt in common by all ; the habits 
 of life from which the series of pictures is to be drawn must 
 be sufficiently fixed and adopted by all ; the beliefs which 
 connect these feelings and these images into a whole must be 
 accepted by all. 
 
 A nation utterly divided among itself, with fierce wars 
 of classes, with a small cultivated minority holding itself 
 apart from the inass of the people, breathing a different 
 atmosphere, admiring and loving different things ; or again, 
 a nation distracted by religious controversies, part occupied 
 in pulling down, part in galvanising old forms into factitious 
 life, part in nursing the germs of future growth ; how can 
 such a nation be animated by those collective emotions, those 
 common sympathies and antipathies, of which dramatic 
 poetry is the outcome ? The appearance of a great dramatic 
 poet in England at the present moment is not easy to believe 
 in. Our wars of classes, our enormous overgrown cities, in 
 which East and West hardly know of one another's existence ; 
 our disputes on every article of faith, the absorption of our 
 men of science in specialities, of our men of practical energy 
 in the building of great fortunes ; our moral reformers con- 
 centrating their attentions on the abolition of this or that 
 
76 
 
 institution, on the rooting up of this or that evil, but holding 
 up no general ideal of good before the whole community to 
 strive for ; — an environment made up of such influences as 
 this renders the existence of a great dramatic poet impos- 
 sible. It becomes for the time a form of life as anomalous 
 •as the dragon or the phoenix. 
 
 But it was far different with the Spain of Calderon, The 
 Thirty Years' War had ended. Spain, .. to use Comte's 
 expression, was " saved " from Protestantism. This expres- 
 sion has scandalised many — let us see what it means. 
 
 The Catholic Church, as Cardinal Newman has so abun- 
 dantly shown, was the result of a long evolution. Its dogmas 
 grew very gradually, and were intimately connected, as 
 Comte has pointed out (for no Catholic writer could see this), 
 with the social organisation that made it possible for the 
 priest to hold his own against the king. It is difficult to find 
 the creeds in the New Testament. The Divinity of Christ is 
 very dimly expressed there : the Trinity not at all ; the doc- 
 trines of Transubstantiation, and of the worship of the Virgin, 
 no one assuredly could find who had not been taught them 
 elsewhere. All these things were of very slow growth ; you 
 find more of them in Saint Augustin than in Saint Paul ; 
 more of them in Thomas Aquinas than in Saint Augustin. 
 
 Now Protestantism, regarded as a doctrine, is an arbitrary 
 arrest of that evolution at a fixed point. The hard and fast 
 line was not drawn by all Protestants at the same fixed point, 
 and here began the difficulty. By Lutherans and Anglicans 
 it was drawn at the New Testament and Saint Augustin 
 and the first four councils. By Calvinists the line was 
 placed somewhat earlier. But to draw a line at all was a 
 very difficult logical feat, which ended by overtaxing the 
 powers of all who tried it. Interpret your Bible for your- 
 self, so that you end by believing it ; use private judgment, 
 but do not use it too much ; — this was a slippery foundation 
 to build on. 
 
 The intellectual incoherence of Protestantism is too 
 obvious to need much discussion. Socially it gave up the great 
 characteristic of the Catholic Church : an independent priest- 
 hood that could resist the temporal power. If Christianity 
 had been content to assume Protestant forms, the great civilis- 
 ing influence of the Church from the third to the thirteenth 
 century would never have arisen. Saint Gregory, Saint Bene- 
 dict, Saint Bernard, Saint Dominic, Saint Francis, Saint 
 Thomas, would have been impossible ; and the Christikn Church 
 would have been as impotent as it has shown itself to be in 
 Russia. Protestantism then is so incoherent intellectually, and 
 in its moral control of social forces so incompetent, that it has 
 unquestionably exercised in many ways an enfeebling influence 
 
77 
 
 over the nations who have accepted it. It was necessary 
 that part of Europe should be Protestant, otherwise the new 
 remodelUng forces to which we look for re-organisation could 
 never have arisen. If Descartes could not have found a 
 Holland to work in, his work could never have been done.. 
 The partial emancipation of Holland and England in the 
 seventeenth century was necessary if only as a step to the 
 total emancipation of France in the eighteenth. But, looking 
 to the mass of the community, it was undoubtedly well in many 
 ways for those nations who have been spared the incoherent 
 agitation connected with Protestant controversies. 
 
 All this may seem a departure from my subject ; but we 
 shall see that to understand the Calderonian drama without 
 it is impossible. 
 
 That drama may be defined in a word thus : It is the ideal 
 portraiture of the life of a Catholic and Feudal people in all 
 its phases. Now rightly to idealise is a work of the gravest 
 social importance. Many things have been said in comparing- 
 and contrasting the work done by Art and Science in the 
 world. But this at least may be said of Art, that it is the 
 most powerful lever for raising the great mass of mankind 
 outside and above their own immediate interests. The vast 
 majority of men will neither be philosophers nor students-of 
 philosophy. But we may hope for the time when they will 
 be so far artists that all the higher forms of Art shall be 
 received by them with enthusiasm. 
 
 And among forms of Art the drama is surely one of the 
 highest. See what it does. It makes the mass of men specu- 
 late, whether they will or no, on the highest objects of specu- 
 lation, human nature, human character, human life. If you 
 think for a moment of a gathering of men and women in a 
 theatre listening to a masterpiece of Shakespeare, Moliere, 
 or Calderon, and compare it with one of the miscellaneous 
 gatherings at the British Association listening to the last 
 new discovery as to the history of the world before man came 
 into it, you will see that this latter assemblage has really no- 
 sort of title to take precedence over the former. Between a 
 people educated by School Boards and a people educated by a 
 national drama, it is not the School Board folk that seem to- 
 be in the happier case. The people in the theatre are think- 
 ing, unconsciously perhaps, but still thinking, about very 
 difficult problems, and problems well worth the solving. And 
 when to the intellectual stimulus implied in following a 
 dramatic masterpiece you add the collective sympathies- 
 called out, the feelings that all of us there together, rich or 
 poor, high or low, share in common, the touches of nature 
 that make the whole world kin ; and when you add, yet 
 further, those deeper thoughts that reach conscience, and 
 
78 
 
 strike down to the depths of passion, purifying it, to use 
 Aristotle's marvellously profound word,* by stripping its veils 
 away and revealing man to himself as he really is, — we shall 
 •come to think perhaps that, of all functions of social life, that 
 ■of such dramatists as ^schylus, Shakespeare, and Calderon, 
 is among the very highest. . 
 
 Such an institution as the Spanish drama was not built m 
 ^ day. Calderon is its greatest representative, the noblest 
 -of a long line, as Shakespeare of the English drama or 
 ^schylus of the Greek. In the month appropriated in 
 Comte's Historical Calendar to Shakespeare, there are the 
 names of eight Spanish dramatists, six in the week of 
 Calderon, two in the weeks following : Lope de Vega, Guillen 
 de Castro, Guevara, Montalvan, Moreto, Rojas, Tirso de 
 Molina, Alarcon. Now, Lope de Vega was born in 1562 ; 
 Calderon died in 1681. The lives of all the rest fall within 
 these dates. The work of the whole was therefore contained 
 in less than a century — a century to which the history of 
 literature can hardly produce a parallel ; for I have not yet 
 named Cervantes, whose death was almost in the same week 
 as Shakespeare's. 
 
 It was about 1580 that the strolling companies, which 
 abounded in Spain as elsewhere, were permanently fixed in 
 two courtyards in Madrid, still the sites of the two principal 
 theatres. There is this remarkable character distinguishing 
 the foundation of the Spanish drama from the English or 
 any other. From the very first, and throughout, it was 
 subject to religious control. The two brotherhoods, named 
 •of the Sacred Passion and of Solitude, were appointed by the 
 ■Government to take charge of it. The restrictions imposed 
 by them at one time threatened to become intolerably opres- 
 «ive. Under Charles V., all drama that was not strictly 
 theological was suppressed; and Philip 11. made more than 
 •one attempt to do the same thing. In the very last year of his 
 long, sour life, he forbade every form of theatrical representa- 
 tion. The national feeling was, in the end, too strong for him. 
 Nevertheless, no one can doubt that the sort of censorship 
 thus exercised, due as it was partly to the jealous fear of the 
 invasion of Protestant ideas, had very much to do with the 
 purity of language and of thought which distinguishes the 
 Spanish stage. One of its most striking contrasts with 
 the EngUsh contemporary drama, whether of Elizabeth or 
 Charles II., is the almost entire absence of coarse language, 
 or of appeals, subtle or brutish, to sensual feeling. Shake- 
 speare, as we know, stands far above his fellows in these 
 
 * "Eo-Tiv ovv TpayiaUa /Ai]u')jo-is irpa^cMS OTrouSaias Kot TeXctos 
 ■Si' cXcou KoX </)0^ou TTipaivova-a. ttjv tSv Toiovrav imj9r]ix.a.Tiav KaOapa-w. 
 
 Arist. Poet. cap. vi. 
 
yy 
 
 things as in others. But many passages that Shakespeare 
 tolerated would not have been tolerated in Spain. It was 
 not that human passion was excluded. There was no cold 
 classicism turning flesh and blood into marble antiques. In 
 all the countless masterpieces of the Spanish drama, the men 
 are men and the women are women ; and the passions of 
 love, jealousy and revenge — to say nothing of the brighter 
 and merrier sides of life — are painted with an energy and 
 vividness unsurpassed in the whole history of art. But in 
 the vast range of the Calderonian drama there is no word at 
 which a woman could blush. The connexion of the Stage 
 with the Church counts for much in this ; and it was a very 
 close connexion. Lope de Vega, the true founder of the 
 Spanish drama, was first a soldier and afterwards a priest : 
 Calderon was also a soldier, and was also for thirty years a 
 priest. Cervantes was a soldier, as all his readers know ; he 
 fought at Lepanto, as Lope de Vega fought in the Spanish 
 Armada ; and Cervantes, towards the end of his stormy life, 
 entered a rehgious brotherhood. Montalvan was a doctor of 
 divinity. Tirso de Molina, the first author of Don Juan, lived 
 and died in a monastery. Moreto also took orders. All this 
 meant, of course, something widely different from what it would 
 mean now. The Catholic priest of our own time is set to his 
 work very young; he has been brought up in theological col- 
 leges, in strict seclusion from the world. He is kept carefully 
 aloof, so far as the Government will allow, from the public 
 schools of his country. When all the lads of his own village 
 do their duty as soldiers he is not allowed to join them. And 
 brought up in this exotic atmosphere, ignorant of human life 
 in all its phases, joining neither in the intellectual or social 
 progress of his time, he is not likely to do much for the 
 spiritual government of man. But the Church of Spain, in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was co-extensive with the 
 whole life of the nation. And while we bear in mind that 
 certain currents of social progress were rigidly and savagely 
 resisted, that a Descartes, a Bacon, an Isaac Newton, a 
 Locke, a Hume, were impossible in Spain ; that science, 
 philosophy, modern industry, were arrested in their very 
 germs, waiting for later centuries to ripen them, we may yet 
 fairly and frankly own that it has been well that one nation 
 of the European brotherhood should show by example what 
 the old feudal Catholic order was without these things. For 
 Spaniards can say, We have invented no steam engines, and 
 built few factories ; but we are less divided by the war of 
 classes than any other nation ; and we stood up against the 
 tyranny of Napoleon as our fathers stood against the Moors. 
 The life of our nation has been a noble life, and great poets 
 have found it worth their painting. 
 
8o 
 
 The greatest of these poets, if for the moment we except 
 Cervantes, was Calderon. Others were great ; and to others- 
 the structure and constitution of the Spanish drama is due : 
 to Lope de Vega especially, the most astonishingly facile 
 and fertile genius, perhaps, in the long list of the world's- 
 poets. Calderon entered into no field of art that others had 
 not cultivated before ; his metres are the same, the structure 
 of his plays is the same, his choice of subjects the same. But 
 he did their work better. He put wider and deeper thought 
 into it. 
 
 His work, as I have said, was the portraiture of the manners 
 and the passions of a Catholic and Feudal people. Loyalty, 
 Honour, Love, Jealousy, Revenge, — the conflict of all these 
 complex passions offered an inexhaustible treasure-house of 
 themes. The restraints imposed by the Church were 
 assuredly light enough. Impurity and heresy being banished, 
 these poets were free as the winds. The tone was feudal 
 and Catholic : Christian, in the narrower sense of the word, 
 it was not ; as little as it was pagan. Half Calderon's 
 plays turn on fine points of honour, and on the conflicts 
 of honour with love or with loyalty ; and the feeling of 
 honour is neither Christian nor pagan : it is mediasval and 
 feudal. Honour is an alliance of the higher egoistic instincts 
 with the social instincts against the baser passions of fear, 
 lust, or avarice ; this alliance always presupposing a special 
 state of outside opinion to which it is adjusted. The feeling 
 of comradeship must be strong ; the sensibility to praise or 
 blame must be very keen ; and pride, as distinct from vanity, 
 must be strong too ; there is resolution not to submit to force 
 of any kind. Given a social environment corresponding to 
 this combination of feelings, and you have the remarkable 
 phase of feeling unknown in Europe before the Middle Ages, 
 though paralleled perhaps till lately in Japan, called the 
 sense of honour ; and it remains, and will always remain, 
 a stronger guarantee for truthful dealing between man and 
 man than any which has been created by theology. No such 
 machinery for crushing the baser power of egoism has ever 
 been invented. To be too proud to tell a lie, to suffer death 
 rather than disgrace — feelings of this kind lie at the root of 
 all noble character. Their germs may be traced everywhere, 
 but it was mediaeval life that first brought them into promi- 
 nence ; and of the two elements of mediaeval life it was the 
 Feudal rather than the Catholic element from which they 
 sprang. In Oriental Christendom, where the feudal element 
 was absent, you find few traces of all this. In Spain the 
 feeling was stronger than elsewhere; and it led sometimes 
 to strange aberrations, which Calderon, in such dramas 
 as The Painter of his own Dishonour, was not slow to indi- 
 
8i 
 
 cate. Be this as it may, the antagonism of honour with 
 love and loyalty, in combinations of circumstances which 
 Calderon surpassed all other poets in contriving, gave the 
 Spanish poet such opportunities for bringing into prominence 
 the grandest elements of our moral nature, as Greek sculp- 
 tors had for portraying the physical form of man in the 
 contests of their wrestlers. 
 
 An even stronger contrast between ancient and modern 
 poetry is the part which women hold in it. One or two 
 beautiful types apart, like the Penelope of Homer or the 
 Antigone of Sophocles, the women of Greek poetry are 
 either slaves, like Briseis, whose ownership stirs quarrel, or 
 pernicious phantoms like Helen, or revengeful demons like. 
 Clytemnestra and Medea. Such portraits of women as 
 Shakespeare and Scott have given us are of modern creation, 
 for the originals themselves are modern. In the dignity 
 and noble charm of his women Calderon seems to me some- 
 times supreme amongst poets. I do not maintain, of course, 
 that in delineating the subtle idiosyncrasies of character either 
 in man or woman he is to be mentioned in the same phrase 
 as Shakespeare. Shakespeare came into the world to teach 
 this one truth above others, a truth of the profoundest social 
 import, and which needed telling — that every man and woman 
 born into the world differs from every other man and woman. 
 And portraiture of individualities of character have been the 
 strong point of English art ever since. Calderon's powers 
 did not lie in painting individualities of character. His men. 
 and women are the men and women of Titian or Vandyke, 
 rather than those of Holbein or Reynolds. Nevertheless, I think 
 that women, broadly speaking, play a more important part in 
 Calderon's drama than in Shakespeare's. They have more 
 responsible work to do ; and some of them reach heights and 
 depths which Shakespeare never measured. I will give as an 
 instance Calderon's Mariamne, the victim of Herod's atro- 
 cious jealousy. There is a vague prophecy which haunts the 
 drama like a dim phantom that she is to die by his hand. 
 Herod is passionately in love, and his love stirs him to 
 attempt the conquest of the world that he may make her its 
 empress. Nevertheless, he is possessed by frantic jealousy, 
 lest, he dying the first, she should be possessed by another ; and 
 knowing that his own life is in danger from Octavius, against 
 whom he had fought, and whom he knew to have expressed 
 great admiration for his wife's beauty, after having seen her 
 picture, he descends to the infamy of attempting her life. 
 Mariamne gets knowledge of the plot. She begs her hus- 
 band's life from Octavius. Then, with very noble and calm 
 indignation — beneath which her outraged love lies buried — • 
 she tells her husband that she will never see him again. Octa- 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 vius, wishing to protect her from Herod's frantic rage, secretly 
 obtains access to her, and urges her to flight. But, with 
 quiet dignity, she tells him she needs no protection : — 
 
 My lips were dumb when first I saw you here ; 
 And now I hear you speak my breath comes back 
 Plainly to tell you this : Some perjured traitor 
 It must be who has dared to fill your mind 
 With this abhorred proposal. Sir, my husband 
 Is my husband ; and say he were to kill me 
 I am guiltless, — -which in the flight you talk of 
 I could not be. I dwell in safety here. 
 And you are ill-informed about my grief ; 
 And though you were not, and the dagger's point 
 Should hush my life, I die not through my fault, 
 But through the fatal influence of my star ; 
 And to die spotless is a lighter thing 
 Than to live pointed at by common scorn. 
 If therefore you intend me any kindness. 
 You cannot do a greater than to leave me.* 
 
 It is too late. Octavius and Herod meet in the dusk, 
 and Herod's fatal dagger — meant for his enemy — ^falls on 
 Mariamne. I think that any one who reads this play care- 
 fully will say that Mariamne is greater than Desdemona ; 
 her equal in purity ; her superior in womanly dignity. 
 
 Take again the Justina of The Sorcerer {El magico prodi- 
 giosd). This play has, superficially enough, been compared 
 with Gothe's Faust. But what woman in Faust, whether in 
 the first part or the second, — what woman in any poem of 
 Gothe, is to be compared to Justina ? Cyprian of Antioch, 
 like Faust, has sold his soul to the Demon ; he claims from 
 the Demon that he shall win Justina, a young Christian of 
 that city. Then the Demon tempts Justina, not with neck- 
 laces and earrings, like Mephistopheles, but with the subtlest 
 and most delicate influences of art and nature that from the 
 air all round her breathe ethereal love. This may be read in 
 Shelley's exquisite fragment of translation, too long to quote 
 here, and too beautiful to mutilate ; as also the passage where 
 Justina resists the Tempter : — 
 
 JuSTlfjA. 
 
 So shall thy promise fail. This agony 
 Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul 
 May sweep imagination in its storm. 
 The will is firm. 
 
 D.EMON. 
 
 Already half is done 
 In the imagination of an act : 
 The sin incurred, — the pleasure then' remains. 
 Let not the will stop half way on the road. 
 
 * The translation of this extract is based on Ticknor's, as given in his 
 " History of Spanish Literature " ; but it is rather closer to the origina 
 
»3 
 
 JUSTINA. 
 
 I will not be discouraged, nor despair. 
 Although I thought it : and although 'tis true 
 That thought is but a prelude to the deed ; — 
 Thought is not in my power, but action is. 
 I will not move my foot to follow thee. 
 
 Feudal life in all its phases is the staple material of the 
 Calderonian drama. But, as I have said, feudal life in Spain 
 was not accompanied by the war of caste and class that 
 embittered it elsewhere. The homelier side of Spanish life 
 has a dignity all its own, as readers of Cervantes know. And 
 perhaps in the whole range of European literature no more 
 genuinely republican poem is to be found than Calderon's 
 Mayor of Zalamea, where the poor village magistrate carries 
 out the utmost penalties of the law on the king's officer, and 
 with grave decorum upholds the righteousness of his action 
 before the king himself. 
 
 One short quotation gives the key-note to the whole. The 
 General, Don Lope, is remonstrating with Farmer Pedro for 
 what he thinks disrespectful treatment of the officer who had 
 been billeted upon him, and who had already shown insolent 
 attention to his daughter. 
 
 General. By God, sir, do you know he is a Captain ? 
 
 Pedro. By God, sir, I do ; and, though he were a General, I would kill 
 him if he touched my reputation. 
 
 General. If a man here touches one hair of the poorest soldier in my 
 army, as sure as there's a God in heaven, I'll send him to the gallows. 
 
 Pedro. And as sure as there's a God in heaven, if any one here makes 
 free with one jot or one tittle of my honour, I'll send him to the gallows toj.* 
 
 General. Don't you know that you, in your station of life, are bound to 
 bear this charge ? 
 
 Pedro. Bound for my money's worth, yes : for my good name, no. My 
 fortune and my life are the king's ; my honour belongs to my own soul ; 
 and my soul belongs to God. 
 
 On many sides of Calderon's work I have left myself no 
 space to dwell. The April and May Mornings, gay, delicate, 
 and rich as a picture by Watteau ; Life's a JDream, the pro- 
 foundest and most original of his dramas, the humorous 
 bravery, wild adventure, and lurid passion of countless 
 others, must be unnoticed here. I pass to that part of his 
 life's work on which he himself set most store : his re- 
 ligious drama. In the full maturity of his powers, after full 
 experience of the world as a soldier, a diplomatist, and a 
 courtier, after delighting it with his brilliant pictures and 
 profound studies of the passions and struggles of life, he 
 became a priest. The thirty remaining years of his life were 
 spent mainly, and yet not entirely, in the composition of 
 poems called Autos SacramentaUs : in other words, public acts 
 
 * The point of the story is that Pedro was as good as his word. 
 
 G2 
 
84 
 
 in honour of the Sacrament. They were, in fact, mystery- 
 plays, like those that were performed in every country through 
 the Middle Ages, and of which the Ammergau play is a sur- 
 vival. These autos were performed at the festival of Corpus 
 Christi, in Madrid, in Toledo, and in Seville, and indeed 
 throughout Spain. Calderon was not the first poet who 
 wrote such plays : for Lope de Vega, and many others, had 
 . done the same thing. But by the energy which he concen- 
 trated on the subject', by the infinite variety which he gave to 
 a few very simple themes, by the wealth of thought and 
 imagination which he poured into it, Calderon has made this 
 great branch of art his own. It was in no pietistic or morbid 
 mood, but in deliberate judgment, that he judged this part of 
 his work far more important than the rest. It was not merely 
 because he became a priest that he exchanged secular for 
 religious drama. He wrote several religious dramas before he 
 became a priest ; he wrote some secular plays afterwards, 
 one in the last year of his life. But for the last third of his 
 life, that is, say, for thirty years, he devoted himself mainly 
 to the great work of clothing the religious beliefs of his 
 countrymen in a poetic form. For his secular plays he cared 
 so little that it was with some difficulty that he was persuaded 
 towards the end of' his life to draw up a list of them ; but 
 some of the Saciramental Acts he was at the pains of editing, 
 and altogether he wrote one hundred, of which seventy-two 
 have been preserved. 
 
 The religious drama of Calderon falls under two heads ; 
 his Plays of Saints, and his Sacramental Acts. The first 
 were written on the same plan as ordinary plays : they were 
 in three acts ; the characters were living men and women ; 
 the supernatural machinery is hardly more prominent than in 
 Shakespeare's Macbeth or Hamlet. The Purgatory of Saint 
 Patrick, the Devotion of the Cross, and The Sorcerer, from which 
 I have already quoted, are examples. 
 
 But the Sacramental Acts stand entirely apart from this. 
 The occasion, the subject, the place, the audience, the style, 
 the mode of construction, were all different from those of 
 other dramas. The occasion was the festival of Corpus 
 Christi ; the uniform theme was the dogma of Transubstan- 
 tiation ; the place the public square of the city ; the audience 
 was the whole population of that city, from king to beggar. 
 There were religious functions in the churches ; there were 
 processions of priests and people through the streets, the 
 king carrying his lighted taper like any other layman ; there 
 was kneeling of the vast multitude in the street, as prayer 
 alternated with song ; and, midway in the ceremonial, all 
 gathered before the stage erected in the market place, and the 
 play began. The plays were in one act, preceded by a prelude. 
 
85 
 
 The personages were, for the most part, allegorical beings, 
 like those of Bunyan's Pilgrim, or of his Town of Mansoul.* 
 
 The titles of these wonderful works show the infinite play 
 of fancy which could present one and the same theme in so 
 marvellous a variety of forms. The Merchant-Ship, The Brazen 
 Serpent, Belshazzar's Feast, Psyche and Cupid, The Divine Orpheus, 
 The True God Pan, Sacred Parnassus, The Sorceries of Sin, 
 To God through Policy, No better Luck than God, The World's 
 a Stage, The Dumb Devil, The World's Market, Gideon's Fleece — 
 these, and 6ther the like titles, prepare us for what we 
 •are to ■ find. As for the characters Bunyan himself is 
 far outstripped by their variety. The Christian virtues, the 
 seven deadly sins, the five senses, Judaism, Paganism,f 
 Mahommedanism, Atheism, the Saints, the Sibyls, the 
 heroes of the Old Testament or of Greek or Roman 
 story ; Earth, Air, Fire, and Water ; the trees of the forest, 
 the seven days of Creation, the Sacraments, the orders of 
 Chivalry, Human Nature, Intellect, Free-will, demons of 
 every sort, and the Creator Himself; — all these, and more, 
 ■are called on the stage. The appeal is not to pity and 
 terror only, or to religious awe. There is much wholesome 
 scorn and genial mockery. Not one of, these sacred plays 
 but has its fool. Atheism in one play. Free-will in another. 
 Gluttony in a third, gave infinite amusement to the audience. 
 On the mechanism of the stage great pains were lavished. 
 Vast cars of boat-like shape, suspended in the air, were 
 swung round to the front, containing the personages of each 
 successive scene. The decoration was magnificent and 
 costly. 
 
 A short account of one of these plays will serve as an 
 ■example to the rest. 
 
 In the Divine Orpheus a black pirate ship appears on the 
 ^gloomy waters of Chaos and of Night ; the captain is the 
 Prince of Darkness, and Envy is with him. A sweet voice 
 heard in the distance makes them shudder. Then, through 
 the dim light, a vast globe shows itself, and, opening into two 
 hemispheres, discovers Orpheus. He invokes Chaos, and, as 
 he sings, a third car appears, in which are seen sleeping the 
 Seven Days of Creation. One after another, each is bidden 
 to awake. Let there be light, the Master sings, and the 
 first Day rises with his torch and passes on. The second 
 divides the sea and sky ; the third brings fruit and flowers ; 
 
 * Calderon's Philothea has a remarkable resemblance to the Town of 
 Mansoul. It has been translated by Mr. D. F. MacCarthy. 
 
 t It Is noteworthy that Paganism is invariably treated by Calderon 
 with much more respect than Judaism ; a true, though instinctive, appre- 
 ciation of the preponderating importance of the Grseco-Roman element in 
 modern life. 
 
86 
 
 the fourth the sun and moon ; the fifth arises, and fish swim 
 in the sea, and birds fly through the air ; the sixth is awakened 
 by the magic singing, and beasts break forth from the rock ; 
 and, last of all. Human Nature herself, represented as a 
 beautiful woman, wakes from sleep, and the message of 
 dominion, and free will, and obedience, is delivered to her. 
 The demon has seen and heard this ; but admiring while he 
 hates he is goaded by envious fury, and resolves on her ruin. 
 He bids the pilot of the River of Oblivion to make ready 
 his bark to carry her into eternal night. But Human Nature 
 again appearing, accompanied by Pleasure, the wit and buf- 
 foon of the piece, anJ by the Seven Days, begins to chant 
 the praises of the Creator in the words of the hundred and 
 thirty-sixth psalm ; the chorus of the Days joining in 
 with the refrain. For His mercy endureth for ever. Now be- 
 gins a scene of most courteous gallantry between Orpheus 
 and Human Nature, in which the lover wins his bride 
 and leads her into his palace. The Demon, disguised as a gar- 
 dener, presents himself to the Lady, and persuades her to 
 taste the forbidden fruit. Instantly the Days, one by one, 
 flee from her, each followed by the black shadowy form of 
 Night ; and Human Nature, now called Eurydice, is carried 
 by the Demon across the black water. 
 
 Orpheus returns, bearing a lyre fashioned like a cross, 
 and, breaking forth into musical lamentations ; the chorus 
 of the Days following him. He conjures the pilot Le- 
 theus, who defies him, but who in the act of striking him 
 falls dead. The two disappear in darkness, and an earth- 
 quake follows. The scene changes, and Orpheus reap- 
 pears on the black ship, the mainmast of which is now 
 fashioned like a cross. Orpheus claims his bride from the 
 Demon. The chorus of Days surround her, and lift her to 
 the Ship of Life — the symbol of the Church — which now 
 sails forward, gay with streamers, and carrying at her top a 
 lantern, in which is placed the Chalice and the Host. "What 
 avails it," says the Prince of Darkness, " that you take her 
 from me ? for, whenever your face is turned away, she will 
 come back to my prison." " I accept the challenge," Orpheus 
 replies, " for in the ship of life are Sacraments to guard her 
 from that danger." " What Sacraments are these ! " ask 
 Envy and the Demon from the deck of their Black ship. 
 " Seven," says one of the Days from the other ship, " and 
 the holiest of all is that which this lantern shows : the body 
 and blood of Christ in bread and wine." Then actors and 
 spectators sink on their knees, and with triumphant chorus, 
 broken only by the moans of the Demon, bid god-speed to 
 the Ship of the Church. 
 
 Such was Calderon : his life being of all great artists 
 
«7 
 
 almost the completest that I know. It was lived out to the 
 full in health and full activity. No base passion choked it, 
 no harsh circumstance hampered its free growth. Soldier, 
 diplomatist, courtier, and priest, the favourite of his king, 
 the beloved of his nation — whose pride and sorrows he shared 
 to the full — his experience of life was richer than Dante's or 
 Milton's, for he could laugh as well as .weep ; richer than 
 Gothe's, for he knew what religion was, and Gothe did not. 
 His culture was the high culture of the Renaissance, well 
 stored in such philosophy as Aristotle and Aquinas taught ; 
 eagerly receptive of every phase of esthetic or natural beauty. 
 He loved music ; he lived with great painters as well as great 
 poets, and he wrote a treatise on their art. And, finally, 
 sparing of all detail though his biographer has been, he has 
 told us these two simple things worth many volumes of im- 
 pertinent minuteness ; the house of Calderon was the refuge 
 for every one in distress, and he never made an enemy, or 
 said a bitter word of any one. 
 
 Of all great poets he is among those few who have well 
 understood and completely fulfilled the social function of the 
 poet. That function is to idealise the life of his nation in all 
 its phases, standing half way between abstract principle and 
 realised result, and bridging over the gulf between them. 
 Homer did this for the world. Dante, impeded by hard 
 circumstance, and uttering dark oracles for the few rather 
 than the many, did this for mediaeval Europe. Calderon, 
 happier in his narrower sphere, did this for Spain. And it 
 is in Calderon that we see the latent capacity for poetic 
 development that lay within Catholic and feudal society, 
 had only the fatal imperfections of the Catholic doctrine 
 permitted, and could we forget that behind the splendid 
 pageant of the Autos Sacramentales loomed the lurid smoke- 
 clouds of the Autos da Fe. 
 
 The history of great poets and of their times teaches us 
 something of the conditions which allow great poets to arise. 
 It may be that our own time is not one of those in which the 
 greatest minds will easily accept this form of spiritual ac- 
 tivity. An age in which every doctrine is disputed and none 
 accepted, an age of chronic warfare between rulers and ruled, 
 between, rich and poor — in which the very sexes, are be- 
 ing goaded, however vainly, into ignoble rivalry — is not the 
 age of great poets. Our business is the harder and duller 
 work of establishing firm principles, of laying foundations of 
 solid convictions on which the future fabric of human life 
 may rest. Yet it is some solace amidst the confusion and 
 disarray of modern life to look forward to the after-time 
 when a faith that unites men and nations, instead of divid- 
 ing them, shall be embodied in song and colour and carved 
 
stones, and stir the hearts of men, as no written words can 
 do, to noble impulse and action. 
 
 Dante admitted with much hard straining here and there 
 one Pagan into Paradise, or remitted for others the fiercer 
 pains of Hell. Calderon using a poet's licence to break the 
 limits of the Church's rules, handled the beliefs of our 
 Greek and Roman ancestors with kind indulgence. But 
 to us the whole life of Humanity is one, and is sacred, from 
 her earliest childhood to her remotest future : for us her days 
 are " bound each to each with mutual piety " : for us the 
 faiths. Pagan, Christian, or Mussulman, which have hurled 
 nations into deadly conflict, even whilst they knit their ranks 
 together, are but varying and imperfect forms of one and the 
 same religion which shall one day unite the world. And thus 
 the treasure-house of future poets and artists is boundless, 
 for it is nothing less than the history of Humanity,* 
 
 * The seven plays of Calderon, selected by Auguste Comte in his volume 
 of Spanish plays (Paris 1854) are as follows : Two Stabs in the Dark, The 
 Mayor of Zalamed, Life's a Dream, Not Always so Bad as we Think, April and 
 May Mornings, The Merchant Ship, The Lord's Vineyard. 
 
V. 
 
 MAN THE CREATURE OF 
 HUMANITY. 
 
MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY* 
 
 - — .j*f- 
 
 " The subordination of Progress to Order, of Atiafysis to 
 SfittJiesis, of Self-loi'e to Love of OfJitrs : tJi«se are the three 
 tiwdes, practical, theoretical, and ethical, of describitig the problem 
 of Man's life; the attainment of complete and lasting unity . These 
 various K>ays of stating what is in truth one question correspond to 
 the three sides of our natttre, activity, intelligence, and feeling : but so 
 inter-dependent are these, that the three aspects of the problem are not 
 merely coniucted, tltey are identical. Nevertlieless the last of tliese 
 tahes precedence of the two others, siitce it alone touches the direct 
 source in which the solution is to be found. For Order implies Love; 
 Synthesis is_ impossible except as the result of Sympathy. Con- 
 sequently unity in speailation and unity in action are impossU>le 
 rnthout unity in feeling. Therefore Religion is more important than 
 PhUosoph}- or Polity. And thus in the last resort it may be said that 
 the problem of life is to bring about harnwny in our feelings by 
 enlarging social love and repressii^ selfkve. To do this implies the 
 subordination of change to permanence, and of tlie spirit of detail to 
 large conceptions of the whole." 
 
 This is the opening paragraph of the last volume which 
 Comte lived to ^^Tite. It was a treatise on mathematics ;t the 
 first of a series of four volumes, of which the second was to 
 deal with himian nature : the tliird with education, moral 
 and intellectual, conceived of as continuing from birth to old 
 age : and the fourth with man's practical work in the world. 
 
 In the few sentences which I have read lie, as I conceive, 
 the whole essence of Comte's teaching. Rightly to under- 
 stand them would ask the study of a lifetime. Yet a little 
 
 • Delivered at Newtom Hall, Nov. 27. 1S81. It is an attempt to define 
 the relaticm of Ethic to Sociology. 
 
 t SyntMise Sti^ietive, on syst^e uni\'ersel des conceptions propres a 
 l'6tat normal de I'humanite. Vol. I. Paris, 1856. 
 
92 
 
 time may be well spent in asking ourselves what they mean. 
 To begin a treatise on mathematics- with language of this 
 kind seems, at first hearing, a strange arrangement of thought. 
 What can mathematics have to do with morality ? What 
 can the opposition between broadness of view in science, and 
 love for specialities and details, have to do with the subordi- 
 nation of self-love to social love? And again, this further 
 question will be asked : Admitting that love of others is good, 
 that order is good, that comprehensiveness of view is good, 
 are we in the future to do without self-love, to abandon pro- 
 gress, to dispense with specialities and details ? If so, that 
 may be good for angels, but hardly for men ; and even if 
 good, surety impossible and Utopian. I think that the 
 answer to these questions will lead us some way towards 
 understanding the whole purpose of Auguste Comte's life 
 and work ; the Ufe and work which we here, within the 
 varying measure of our powers, propose for our imitation. 
 
 And, first of all, I dwell on the first word of the sentence 
 which I have read, — the word subordinate. To subordinate 
 analysis to synthesis, progress to order, egoism to altruism, 
 does not mean that you replace one member of these couples 
 by the other ; that analysis, progress, egoism are to be super- 
 seded, and synthesis, order, altruism substituted ; though many 
 superficial readers of Comte, whether disciples or critics, seem 
 to think so. One of the hardest and rarest things — one of 
 the surest marks of a wise, healthy, well-balanced nature — is 
 to hold two good things of unequal value simultaneously, and 
 yet not to set the same value on them ; to be able to say, 
 This is better than that ; and yet that is not bad, but, on the 
 contrary, good, useful, indispensable. To subordinate does 
 not mean to suppress ; it means to give the utmost margin of 
 free play to the lower that may be compatible with the pre- 
 cedence of the higher. 
 
 Let us follow out this thought in the case before us. 
 
 And first, the subordination of Progress to Order does not 
 mean the suppression of Progress ; as the principal motto of 
 Positivism — Love the Principle, Order the basis. Progress 
 the end — sufficiently shows. What is meant appears more 
 clearly in the thirteenth law of Comte's First Philosophy, 
 Progress is the development of Order. It is the new growth 
 of the tree — essential, were it only as the surest evidence of 
 the life of the tree — but not to be compared in importance 
 to the tree itself. Yet many of the anarchists and some of the 
 philanthropists of our day seem to think otherwise. They are 
 always killing the goose for the sake of the golden egg. They 
 are always trying to knock down some permanent institution 
 of society, built up by centuries of persistent effort, because 
 it stands in the way of some partial and temporary reform. 
 
93 
 
 They forget that the order of the nineteenth century repre- 
 sents the accumulated .progress of nineteen, or rather thirty- 
 and forty centuries before it ; and that by the side of this the 
 progress of the nineteenth century, or any other, is but a 
 small matter. The habits, principles, prejudices which keep 
 a quiet village community together are the growth of ages.. 
 When, for the sake of increasing the week's earnings, we set 
 up factories and ironworks without the least regard to the 
 pre-established life of that village, we know what happens. 
 We have tried that on a gigantic scale in Lancashire and 
 elsewhere ; and it is possible that if the industrial revolution of 
 the last hundred years in England had to begin over again — 
 if we could put ourselves back, now, at the time of Arkwright 
 and Watt — that many of us would try and see that the work 
 were done rather differently. Wordsworth from his mountains 
 saw the revolution going on, and prophesied its results truly. 
 He saw wholesome village life, with a manly, independent 
 peasantry, and hardy vigorous children, disappearing under 
 canopies of smoke into hideous encampments of unwhole- 
 some cottages clustered round the new industrial castles, 
 where-wives were drawn from their homes, and little children, 
 were imprisoned to hard labour for twelve hours a day. An 
 enormous population has thus been stimulated into a dis- 
 organised, unwholesome existence. We have partially repaired 
 or palliated the evil by school boards, and people's parks, and 
 factory acts. But we might have prevented it. And can we 
 deny that there is wisdom in the instinct that leads Chinese 
 statesmen to shrink from sudden, unchecked introduction 
 df the same system into their eighteen provinces holding one- 
 fourth of the world's population ? They have got an order of 
 village life, a hard-working peasantry, a system of ancient 
 rites, and customs, and prejudices ; they have their reverence 
 for the dead, their respect for age, their fetish-worship of the 
 sky — in short, a settled fabric of life, which, when destroyed,, 
 is not so easily built up. And are they not right to abide by 
 this till they can be very sure that the steam-engine and the 
 railway shall not shatter it to pieces ? 
 
 I must not pursue this subject. I only note, lest I should 
 be misunderstood as a supporter of an idle, imaginary, or 
 querulous conservatism, that one month out of the Positivist 
 Calendar is consecrated to the heroes of industrial progress ; 
 Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, and their fellows. The sub- 
 ordination of progress to ordet involves no discouragement 
 to progress. Progress is the very end we propose to our- 
 selves. Only we contend that it shall be a development of 
 Order, not a destruction of it ; and that Order shall mean the 
 order of the whole of man's life, not the one-sided considera- 
 tion of a special portion of it. 
 
94 
 
 We begin, then, to see that Comte is right in saying 
 that the subordination of progress to order is part of the 
 same problem as the subordination of analysis to synthesis, 
 and the subordination of egoism to altruism. That is to say. 
 Our intellect must conceive the whole of man's life : our 
 heart must sympathise with the whole of it. 
 
 And now let us pass to the second aspect of the threefold 
 problem : the subordination of analysis to synthesis. 
 
 What is analysis ? What is synthesis ? 
 
 Analysis is the same thing as dissection : it means taking 
 to pieces. Synthesis is the reverse process : putting together. 
 A watchmaker separating the parts of a watch, and putting 
 them together again, performs successively an act of analysis 
 and an act of synthesis. A botanist takes a plant, examines 
 each part separately — its root, its stem, the way the leaves 
 are grouped, the shape of the leaf, the mode of flowering ; 
 the calyx, petals, stamen and pistils ; the position of the seed 
 in the ovary ; the position of the germ in the seed ; he 
 analyses the plant. But the list of all these parts does not 
 make up the plant. There remains the after process, which 
 alone gives meaning and purpose to what has gone before. 
 A poet like Gothe, who is a naturalist also, or a naturalist 
 like Humboldt, who is also a poet, will paint the whole life of 
 the plant, its climate, its distribution in the world, and its 
 importance to the life of man or of animals, its work in this 
 world, in short. That is synthesis, and that alone is the final 
 reality. And note, in passing, that I have let fall the word 
 poetry. For a little thought will show that synthesis has 
 something to do with sympathy. The man who can "peep 
 and botanise upon his mother's grave ", may be a good 
 analyst. But Burns, stopping his plough to pick the daisy 
 which he has immortalised, was of another mould. Not that 
 the analysing process is to be depreciated. So long as the 
 dissector keeps his place, let there be no word that is not 
 respectful of his patient labour. Anatomy is needful ; the 
 -dog or horse cannot be fully understood without minute 
 record of muscle, bone and brain. Only let it be always 
 remembered that the crowning process is when such a 
 naturalist as Leroy enters with all the power of heart and 
 mind into the actions, and thoughts and feelings of the living 
 creature, and paints them as a whole. 
 
 Take another instance. The life of a nation has many 
 sides to it, and one of those sides is the acquisition of 
 wealth. It is possible, by an effort of abstraction, to con- 
 centrate exclusive attention on the instincts which prompt 
 man to buy, and sell, and accumulate, and to speculate on the 
 arrangements which would come about if he had no other 
 motives or instincts but these ; if he were a mere buying and 
 
95 
 
 ■selling animal. And these supposed arrangements have been 
 embodied in a doctrine called Political Economy, which was 
 regarded a generation ago as a sort of foundation of modern 
 statesmanship. Here is an instance of analysis insufficiently 
 subordinated to synthesis. A truer philosophy has shown us 
 that man regarded as a commercial machine is a pure 
 abstraction ; that the life of a nation is made up of customs, 
 laws, prejudices, institutions, hopes, and fears ; and that 
 among these the money-loving instincts play an important, 
 but by no means always a preponderating part. Statesman 
 after statesman has been compelled to see that this analysis 
 or abstraction of the wealth-loving instinct is no sufficient 
 foundation for practical legislation; that hundreds of other 
 things, in a word the whole multiplex nature and environ- 
 ment of man's life, must be taken into account. 
 
 The failure of the Irish Encumbered Estates Act of 
 1854, ^^'^ the need of dealing with the problem now (1881) 
 on wholly different principles, form a signal proof of this. 
 Wider theory and wiser practice concurred in condemnation 
 of the policy based on the unreal abstraction hitherto upheld 
 as economic science. Not that the abstraction had been useless. 
 The service rendered by Hume, Adam Smith, and other great 
 publicists in analysing the economic side of human affairs is 
 unquestionable. Only the results of their dissection should 
 have been kept duly subordinated to the concrete realities of 
 the case. That this was not done is not to be imputed to 
 them, but to statesmen led astray by the instincts and preju- 
 dices of plutocracy, who were too apt to regard these economic 
 abstractions as precepts for practical legislation. And note 
 further that for the rectification of their error, sympathy was 
 needed to assist synthesis. To the common instinct of men 
 the doctrines of Political Economy, as preached by Lord 
 Brougham and McCulloch fifty years ago, were as repugnant, 
 as by the light of a deeper and broader philosophy they were 
 found to be unreal. 
 
 I will take yet one more illustration ; which, though it be 
 drawn from an abstruse subject, will not be found, perhaps, 
 so difficult of comprehension as it might at first seem. I have 
 quoted already from Comte's last work left unfinished. The 
 first volume was, as I have said, a treatise on Mathematics ; 
 to be followed, had he lived to complete it, by a Treatise on 
 the Theory and the Training of Human Nature. This ma- 
 thematical volume, penetrated, strange as it may seem, with 
 human sympathies from the first page to the last, is a putting 
 together of all the really essential truths of the science, from 
 arithmetic to the transcendental calculus, in an orderly arrange- 
 ment. It sets forth that all the methods of reasoning used by 
 man, — not merely deductive reasoning, but induction in all its 
 
forms, from simple observation to comparison and historical 
 filiation,— are available, and can be most usefully followed, in 
 this region of thought. The volume is, then, what he himself 
 called it, a Treatise of Logic. But Logic, with Comte, had a 
 wide meaning. It was much more than the manipulation of 
 dry and abstract symbols. 
 
 Now the greatest of all mathematical conceptions, and the 
 most fruitful both in scientific results and in its influence on 
 the mind, is the dealing with curved lines as an assemblage 
 of infinitely small straight Hues, the direction of each _ of 
 which shows the tendency of the curve at any given portion 
 of its course. The mode of handling these infinitely small 
 sti-aight lines is a branch of science called the differential 
 calculus. And when we have analysed the curve by means 
 of it, when we have, so to speak, dissected it into its ultimate - 
 elements, by means of these abstract and imaginary straight 
 lines that we have called to our aid, we then have to perform 
 the opposite process : we have to get rid of this artificial 
 scaffolding, and to know about the curved line itself as a 
 whole; how long.it is, what space it surrounds, and so on. 
 This opposite process is called the process of integration : 
 and the modes of doing it constitute the integral calculus. 
 After the analysis comes the synthesis ; after the long wander- 
 ing through abstruse algebraic formulae, the mathematician 
 comes back in the end to the concrete practical problem 
 which the land surveyor, or carpenter, or tool maker, had 
 handled before him, though not with the same unerring 
 precision. 
 
 Now, says Comte, in one of the most remarkable passages* 
 of the volume I am speaking of, this succession of two pro- 
 cesses is what we do throughout the whole range of science. 
 In the first six sciences, from mathematics to sociology, we 
 take partial views of human nature, dissecting it into its 
 various elements, a way which corresponds to nothing real, but 
 which is necessary to guide us : in a word, we differentiate. 
 
 In the mathematical and physical sciences we find the out- 
 ward conditions of man's life ; his physical environment, the 
 laws that regulate space, time, season, climate ; the activities 
 of matter, light, heat, electricity, chemical action. Biology, 
 dealing with man as an animal, tells us of the nutritive 
 life, of the life of sensation and motion, of the life of rudi- 
 mentary intellect and feeling, common to man with dogs^ 
 elephants, or horses. Sociology deals with man's social state, 
 handling each aspect of it separately, — family life, property,, 
 government, language ; and showing the growth of each from 
 century to century. But each and all of these points of view 
 are partial, abstract, theoretical. There remains, after all 
 * Synthese Subjective, pp. 506 — 528. 
 
97 
 
 this necessary work of analysis is done, the final science, 
 which is at the same time the final art ; the science of 
 human nature, and the art of acting upon it. Here only 
 do we reach the reality, the whole of our subject ; here only 
 do we integrate. This, then, is the central point of the 
 synthesis. And here, too, far more clearly than before, 
 stands out the relations between synthesis and sympathy. 
 Here the profoundest philosopher, at the ultimate stage of 
 his long circuit through the paths of thought, finds himself 
 with the same work to do that a poor peasant woman does 
 when she strives, with quiet good sense and loving firmness, 
 to keep her husband honest and sober, her children brave 
 and pure. 
 
 We have seen then these two things. First, the subordi- 
 nation of analysis to synthesis is something widely different 
 from the suppression of analysis. Secondly, what seems 
 the unmeaning paradox of connecting this with the subordi- 
 nation of egoism to altruism, is a very real and deep truth. 
 If in each science the worker could penetrate himself with 
 the thought that his own little piece of dissecting work is but 
 a small addition to what has been done by past workers in 
 the same subject ; and yet, further, that his science taken in 
 its entirety is but a part of a larger whole held together by 
 the central problem of man's life, — there would be a wide- 
 spread agency at work for the subordination of egoism to 
 altruism, the like of which the world has not yet seen. This 
 was the subject of the appeal made by Comte as a young 
 man to the scientific world of his time, to which he obtained 
 so hostile a response. Those whom he addressed made 
 the mistake, wilfully or unconsciously, which I spoke of 
 before. They confounded the subordination of analysis to 
 synthesis with the suppression of analysis by synthesis. In 
 other words, they accused him, Comte, the admired friend of 
 Blainville, Broussais, "and Fourier, of wishing to stifle scientific 
 inquiry. As well say what anarchists say about the defence 
 of Order : that it necessarily means hostility to Progress. 
 They could not see that subordination meant, not subjection, 
 but free play under the stimulating influence of a large and 
 noble purpose. 
 
 We come, then, to the third aspect of the threefold 
 problem, the most important of the three, to which the other 
 two may in the last resort be reduced ; the subordination of 
 egoism to altruism, of self-love to social love. 
 
 So predominant is this over the others, that for the mass 
 of men and women it seems to eclipse them altogether. 
 Philosophy and Politics have nothing to do with the real 
 problem of man's heart, it may be thought. _ Let us leave all 
 else, they are tempted to say, and turn to this. 
 
 H 
 
98 
 
 This is what the mystics of the first age of Christianity 
 did; it is, indeed, what the mystics of all ages have done. 
 But we know what the result has been. Brahmins, Bud- 
 dhists, Christians, have gone into monasteries resolved to 
 stifle self, and have ended too often in indolent, self-indulgent 
 apathy. The nobler part of the religious world, whether 
 Christian or Mahommedan, has taken a different course. 
 They have not withdrawn themselves from men ; they have 
 striven to act upon them. But they have done so by chain- 
 ing the intellectual power, and making it the slave of social 
 and moral needs. Throughout long centuries called — and 
 not unjustly called— dark, although the great and glorious 
 work done in them deserves, and will finally receive, the 
 eternal gratitude of men, a creed was forced upon men by 
 the urgent moral necessities of the time which, though it 
 did not kill, did assuredly narcotise their intellectual life. 
 The inevitable result followed. The chains of the intellect 
 were not gently loosened, but broken in fierce anger ; and 
 the intellect from being a slave became a rebel. Positivism 
 teaches us that the intellect should be neither slave nor rebel, 
 but a free servant. 
 
 To put the thing in plain words, the dream of a Religion 
 apart from Polity and apart from Philosophy is a vain one, 
 and can only end in painful and wasteful disillusion. Rich 
 people with fine feelings who have no battles to fight in the 
 world, or monks in a convent who, though nominally poor, 
 are maintained at other men's cost — often without working — 
 can do without a creed, as they can dispense with the life of 
 citizens. I do not speak of the sordid and rapacious rich, 
 but of the gentler, kindlier sort, to whom the free play of 
 generous sympathy and poetic enthusiasm supplies all they 
 want. Religion for many people who are well-to-do in the 
 world, means this and little more than this. But the mass of 
 hard-working people, whether cultivated or ignorant, need a 
 backbone to their religion. They need the aid of strong 
 ■conviction and principle in those times when hard labour and 
 sorrow have wearied their heart, or when perilous tempta- 
 tions have assailed them. Their sympathy must rest on a 
 Synthesis ; their Love must have the aid of Faith. 
 
 Nevertheless, of the thr«e aspects of the life-problem, 
 the subordination of self-love to social sympathy, though 
 inseparably connected with the other two, is more important 
 than they. Philosophy, affecting as it does that small minority 
 specially charged with the spiritual destinies of our race, 
 ■exercises indirectly, through e&ucation, and in other ways, a 
 profound influence on life. But the influence is indirect. 
 Polity again — since all men are citizens and all women the 
 wives, mothers, or in any case, the daughters of citizens, — 
 
99 
 
 Tvould seem to embrace the whole of life. And it does indeed 
 embrace the whole range of man's activity. Nevertheless, 
 the hidden sources of activity are not reached by it. Greece 
 and Rome show how the widest thought and the noblest 
 political action, separately and exclusively pursued, may 
 result in barrenness and degradation. The source of action 
 became tainted. The heart grew corrupt. The opening 
 paragraphs of Paul's letter to the Roman Church, though 
 faulty in their inevitable failure to own the immense debt due 
 to Rome and Greece, are yet true in their terrible denuncia- 
 tion of the mass of Greco- Roman society in the first century. 
 
 We come, then, at last to this. We have seen in a previous 
 lecture* something of the multiplex nature of man. His brain 
 life, like that of other animals near him in structure, is made 
 up of desires, thoughts, activities. With him as with other 
 animal races the first of these largely preponderate over the 
 ■other two. We have seen, too, that man's desires, not being 
 one but many, range themselves in two classes ; those which 
 are concerned with self-interest and ambition, and those 
 which prompt the satisfaction , and well-being of others. 
 The problem of life then is to see that these diverse desires, 
 thoughts, and activities shall work, so far as it may be 
 possible, in harmony. And harmony implies neither demo- 
 cratic equality on the one hand, nor servile subjection on 
 the other. It implies orderly arrangement, subordination, 
 precedence. The ideal type towards which to strive is this : 
 Action guided by Reason : Reason inspired by unselfish 
 Sympathy ; Self-love kept under control, but in no wise 
 crushed. The soldier in the intervals of battle provides 
 duly for bodily wants ; the greatest of heroes is not insensi- 
 tive to the respect of his fellows : the loftiest saint can love 
 the lilies of the field, or listen to the song of birds, or breathe 
 with delight the fragrance of a summer morning. Asceticism 
 effacing the narrower circles of love on the pretext of ranging 
 more freely over the wider, is no object of our admiration. 
 The health of the soul, as of the body, implies such energy of 
 each part as promotes the energy of the whole. 
 
 But though the elements of the problem came before us 
 in dealing with the brain of man and of animals, the problem 
 itself is not within the compass of Biological science. That 
 there is indeed a moral life in animals, even in those far 
 removed in the scale of life from man, a life which, short- 
 lived though it be, is yet coherent and harmonious, the lines 
 of Dante quoted so admiringly by Comte are enough to show : 
 
 * This discourse was the conclusion of a course of lectures on the 
 Positive Study of Human Nature; and the lecture alluded to was on 
 Comte's theory of the Brain. 
 
100 
 
 E'en as the bird who 'midst the leafy bower 
 Has in her nest sat darkling through the night 
 With her sweet brood, impatient to descry 
 Their wishM looks, and to bring home their food, 
 In the fond quest unconscious of her toil : 
 She of the time prevenient, on the spray 
 That overhangs their couch, with watchful gaze 
 Expects the sun : nor ever till the dawn 
 Removeth from the East her eager ken.* 
 
 Yet in such life, beautiful as it is, there is no continuance. 
 The brood grow up and are scattered, and forget whose care 
 sheltered them from cold and hunger. For most of them 
 some violent death, from the elements or from some stronger 
 bird or beast of prey, is at hand, and all is to begin again. 
 
 To found a social state capable of long continuance and 
 wide extension, has been the privilege of man. Far back in 
 the recesses of time, other societies perhaps strove with his 
 on no unequal terms ; f and as they succumbed in the 
 struggle, either fell back into precarious solitary life, or 
 became associated with man's toil and triumph. In any 
 case, the continuity of the social state brings wholly new 
 conditions into the study of Life. The study of Life means 
 the study of the relations between the organism and the 
 environment. But for the social animal the word environ- 
 ment comprises not merely relations with the physical world, 
 not merely relations with others of the same species round 
 him, but relations with bygone ancestors who have handed 
 down traditions, institutions, and results of every kind, 
 material and moral, by which his whole life is transformed. 
 Thus the continuity of the social state forms the subject- 
 matter of a new science dependent upon Biology, but distinct 
 from it and requiring its own methods of study. 
 
 Let us briefly consider the questions of which this Science 
 treats. They fall under two heads. First, there are the 
 permanent institutions of the social state, found in every 
 stage of its growth. Secondly, there are the progressive 
 changes of Society. The first may be called the anatomical 
 side of the subject, or if we prefer an analogy from another 
 science, the statical side. Under the second head, which we 
 may call the functional or dynamical side, we study the 
 various parts in their free play, and examine the laws of 
 growth and change. In a word, we consider first the Order 
 of Society, Secondly its Progress. 
 
 Under the first head fall the four subjects of Property, 
 Family life. Language, Government. Under the second 
 head, the progress of Society, in Asia and elsewhere, from 
 
 * Paradise, canto 23. 
 
 t This hypothesis was developed by Comte in the first volume of his 
 Positive Polity ; see pages 508 — 17, Eng. Trans. 
 
lOI 
 
 Fetichism to Theocracy ; and the transition in Western 
 Europe from Theocracy to Positivism. Here, then, are seven 
 subjects with which Sociology has to deal. A sentence or 
 two upon each of them will mark out the field of thought 
 more precisely, and save us from the danger of vagueness 
 and verbiage in what follows. 
 
 1. Propeyty. — All animals that build- a dwelling, or that 
 have, as is often the case, a defined range within which they 
 seek their food, show the institution of property in the germ. 
 Families of swans on a river own a given portion of it. 
 Troops of dogs in Constantinople ranging the streets with 
 freedom, and belonging to no masters, have invisible barriers, 
 rigidly defined by their own convention, which they never 
 transgress nor allow dogs belonging to other troops to over- 
 pass. Many animals collect some slight store of food, and 
 conceal it for future use. 
 
 But man alone of the vertebrate animals accumulates 
 from generation to generation. That accumulation is called 
 Capital ; and its formation depends on two laws apparently 
 simple, yet first explicitly formulated by Comte : (i) Man 
 produces more than he consumes : (2) The product can be 
 preserved for a longer or shorter time, but in any case beyond 
 the time necessary for its reproduction when consumed. If 
 corn and roots could not be stored up through a winter the 
 formation of Capital would have been impossible. 
 
 Without pursuing the subject further, it is easy to see the 
 two consequences which are of most importance for our 
 present purpose. First, Capital in its various forms of 
 stored-up food, tools, clothing, houses, etc., gives leisure, as 
 it grows, for new forms of activity, such as decorative art, or 
 religious ritual and other modes of spiritual life. Secondly, 
 Capital is the creation of no one man ; not even of one 
 generation, but of the whole succession of generations. This 
 last conclusion disposes promptly both of the Economic and 
 of the Communistic view of property. On the one hand 
 Property, being social, not individual, in its source, ought to 
 be social, not individual, in its application. On the other 
 hand, no one generation, either by universal suffrage or 
 otherwise, is entitled to dispose at its pleasure of the wealth 
 of the Community. . In other words Capital is the creation of 
 Humanity, and should be used for her benefit. 
 
 2. Family Life. — With many animal races the family tie is 
 strong, and Leroy,* who observed animals with the combined 
 
 * Georges Leroy, the friend of Diderot, a contributor to the Encyclo- 
 paedia, and Ranger of the Parks of Versailles and Marly, published his 
 profoundly philosophical Lettns sur Us Animaux between 1762 and 1781. 
 A new edition (1862) has been published in Paris by Dr. Robinet, and an 
 English translation a few years ago was edited by Dr. Congreve. 
 
102 
 
 instincts of a philosopher and a sportsman, has left striking- 
 pictures of it. Of the two instincts on which the first origin 
 of domestic life depends, one, the maternal, is as strong in 
 many animals widely removed from man as in the human 
 race. The sexual instinct, resulting in some cases in pro- 
 miscuous communism, leads in others to ties of singular per- 
 manence. But in man alone the continuity of social life 
 from generation to generation has made the family the centre 
 of a code of rites, ceremonies, and duties, reacting in the 
 strongest way on the development and the training of his 
 moral life. For many thousand years the religions of the 
 world have taught respect for parents, and have fenced the 
 marriage tie with the strongest sanction which they could 
 give. The Decalogue of Moses is still recited in modern 
 churches ; and Moses was but the repeater of precepts and 
 duties taught, as we now know, for centuries before him by 
 the Egyptian priesthood. 
 
 3. Language. — If the social races of animals, as can hardly 
 be doubted, communicate by voice and gesture the few 
 thoughts necessary for combined action, it seems probable 
 that, as with certain tribes revisited by Humboldt after an 
 interval of many years, such language is short-lived, and has- 
 to be formed again when new occasions for it arise. In any 
 case, the need for continuity of social life is more evident 
 here than in any other case. As every motion is followed 
 by expression, that is, by movement of the muscles of voice 
 or limb, emotions felt in common lead to common signs, and 
 become inseparably bound up in the common activity. So- 
 soon as the activity becomes continuous, the signs connected 
 with it become so likewise, and language, in the human sense 
 of the word, originates. It embodies for each new member of 
 the Society the work done by the head and heart of foregoing 
 generations. The tongue taught to each of us by our mothers- 
 is the voice of the past. 
 
 4. Government. — Government is the mode in which a 
 society brings its combined force to bear upon each member. 
 It has been spoken of as a neces'sary evil ; but not much 
 thought is needed to see that it is as much a part of the notion 
 of society as the diameter is of the notion of a circle. A group 
 of passengers assembled at a railway station is not a society. 
 The most enlightened republic and the most primitive African 
 despotism agree in the one essential that the chief officials of 
 both represent, for the time being, the will of the community. 
 As man is governed partly by fear, partly by the wish to 
 find himself in sympathy with his fellows, it follows that the 
 mode in which the community acts on the individual is of 
 two kinds — force and opinion. In other words, there are 
 always two kinds of government — temporal and spiritual — 
 
which tend, as time goes on, to become more completely 
 separate. The influence of Continuity in this matter — that is 
 to say, th€ preponderance of the Past over the Present — is 
 sufficiently obvious. The most marked feature of a civilised 
 community is the existence of a body of Law. And Law is 
 the mass of governmental acts in past generations, so far as 
 they have been unrepealed. 
 
 These four subjects, with all that ramify from them, make 
 up the Order of Society. But we have further to consider 
 its Progress. The principal factor in Progress has been the 
 change in man's conception of the world around him. 
 
 1 . His hopes and aspirations are first coloured by the belief 
 that the forces of the world around him are like the storms 
 of anger, joy and love in his own heart. All nature is 
 peopled by the savage with human impulses. Ancestral 
 worship is but one among the many forms of this stage of 
 thought ; Totemism, the adoption of special animals as objects 
 of reverence, is another ; and most important in its results of 
 all, is the worship of the planets and of the sky; the first mode 
 of faith capable of welding different tribes together by objects 
 of adoration common to all. Here, then, we have the source of 
 the primitive religion of mankind : seen in its ruder forms in 
 Africa, Polynesia, and traceable in the earliest life of every 
 civilised community : in its most highly developed form still 
 governing the vast empire of China. This form of faith, and 
 the institutions connected with it, are best known under the 
 name of Fetichism ;* an influence in the world never wholly 
 suppressed, and entering largely into the most beautiful and 
 sublime creations of modern poetry. 
 
 2. The worship of heavenly bodies, . tending to unite 
 scattered tribes into communities, was the chief factor in the 
 great intellectual and social revolution which substituted gods 
 for fetiches : that is to say invisible agents guiding and mould- 
 ing nature for the visible objects themselves. Hence grew 
 priesthoods, the interpreters of the god's will to men; and 
 round the priesthood, that highly organised fabric of society 
 called Theocracy, which proved so durable in Egypt and 
 India, and which, but for European invasion, would have 
 established itself over both the American continents. To 
 Theocracy we owe not merely the hereditary aptitude im- 
 planted by caste for various forms of industry, but also what is 
 of infinitely greater moment — hereditary instincts of social 
 
 * This name, adopted by Comte from De Brosses' remarkable work, 
 Les Dieux Fetiches (published 1760), is better fitted to describe the whole 
 system of thought and feeling characteristic of primitive religious belief 
 than the words Animism, Totemism, Ghost-worship, which later writers 
 sometimes substitute for it, but which give too specialist a view of the 
 matter. 
 
discipline. Murder, theft and adultery had been held in check 
 by the Egyptian priesthood for a long range of centuries be- 
 fore the Decalogue of Moses. 
 
 3. Western Europe* is passing from Theocracy to Posi- 
 tivism ; from the reign of Gods to the reign of Humanity, 
 by a long series of transitions ; beginning with the Greek 
 settlements on the Mediterranean, carried on by the Roman 
 Empire, and by the feudal society of the Middle Ages, and 
 culminating in the modern revolution which, from the four- 
 teenth to the nineteenth century, has been transmuting every 
 aspect of private and public life. Arnold was right in saying 
 that modern history began with the Greeks. From Homer, 
 Thales, Aristotle and Caesar^ to Shakespeare, Descartes, 
 Frederic, and Comte, the transition, spite of all oscillations, 
 has been continuous : the substitution of Humanity for 
 Divinity has gone on unceasingly. The Mediaeval Church, 
 commonly regarded as the obstacle to this change, was, in 
 truth, one of its chief, though unconscious, agents. The 
 Christ of St. Paul, and the Virgin of later centuries, were 
 prototypes of Humanity. 
 
 And remark that as this series of changes from Fetichism, 
 through Theocracy and Revolution, to Positivism has pro- 
 ceeded, a wider and deeper sense of man's union has been 
 going along with it. Solidarity, to use the Socialist phrase, 
 has increased with Continuity. Under Fetichism Family 
 hfe was organised, as we see in Africa, in China, and in the 
 primitive-fiistory of all civilised nations. Under Theocracy 
 we get the wider union of the Caste, joining families who 
 followed the same occupation. Greco -Roman history de- 
 veloped the conception of the City or State. Catholicism, 
 and, to a large extent, Islamism also, united many states by 
 the one bond of a common Church. And, finally, the scientific 
 discoveries, industrial inventions and wide commercial in- 
 tercourse of modern times has brought us to feel the ties 
 that bind all the inhabitants of this planet together. 
 
 Such then is the order and the progress which form the 
 subject-matter of this science of Sociology. We learn from 
 it to recognise the existence of Humanity as a power 
 exercising invincible control over each individual life. As 
 little as we can place ourselves on another planet, can we 
 alter our subjection to this power. We are born in a cer- 
 tain family ; we speak a particular language ; we are taught 
 definite duties ; prejudices, customs, principles are instilled 
 into us ; we are the children of one nation and of one cen- 
 tury ; and all the efforts of our will cannot make us other 
 than this, any more than we can leap away from our shadow, 
 or add a cubit to our stature. 
 
 There is no question then as to the reality of this power. 
 
I05 
 
 No one thinks that when he mentions the word England or 
 France or Germany, he is talking of a ghost or a phantom. 
 Nor does he mean a vast collection of so many millions of 
 :men in the abstract ; so many million ghosts. Man in the 
 abstract is of all abstractions the most unreal. By England 
 we mean the prejudices, customs, traditions, history, peculiar 
 to Englishmen, summed up in the present generation, in the 
 living representatives of the past history. So with Humanity, 
 The very language in which a man might seek to deny that 
 he is the creature of humanity, is Humanity's creation. 
 
 Humanity is then the central reaHty for us ; the central 
 point of thought, of activity, of devotion and sympathy. But 
 to have a central meeting-point for thought, action, and sym- 
 pathy, is to have a religion. Religion has no other meaning 
 than the union of thought, activity, and sympathy in subjec- 
 tion to a power governing our individual life. 
 
 Is such a religion Self-worship ? It is strange that it 
 should be necessary to answer such a question. Yet as 
 two friends of mine in the course of the last month have 
 asked it, and indeed have answered it with full assurance 
 •of conviction in their own way, it is needful to say a word 
 •on the matter. The point of the objection is that because 
 we are members of the human race, therefore to worship 
 Humanity is to worship self. Let us see where the mis- 
 <;onception lies. It would seem clear on the face of it that 
 to live for others is not exactly the same thing as living for 
 :self. Yet to live for others is what the religion of Humanity 
 bids us do. It would seem clear that to admire a great poet, 
 -a great statesman, a great benefactor of men in any depart- 
 ment of life whatever, is not precisely self- admiration. Yet 
 this is what the religion of Humanity encourages us to do. 
 It is not very hard to see that true patriotism, — profound 
 respect for the institutions and heroes and brave and true 
 men and women of your country, and resolution to add your 
 •own small result to the fabric which they have reared, — is 
 xot exactly the same thing as devotion to your own personal 
 interests ; yet such patriotism is an essential part of the life 
 demanded by the religion of Humanity. And when, passing 
 outside the limits of that country, you extend your sympathy 
 and your reverence to the good and the great of all times 
 and of all places, and bring your heart and your under- 
 standing to feel and to see that the whole framework of 
 your life is due to what they have done for you, and that 
 the sum of your activities, concentrated on continuing this 
 work, is but the scantiest repayment, though it be the best 
 -in your power, of the debt you owe, — is all this Self-worship ? 
 There must be some strange misconception in the minds of 
 those who have described the religion of Humanity in this way. 
 
What explains the error is the belief that by Humanity 
 we mean the same thing as the human race. We mean 
 something widely different. Of each man's hfe, one part 
 has been personal, the other social : one part consists in 
 actions for the common good, the other part in actions of 
 pure self-indulgence, and even of active hostility to the com-^ 
 mon welfare. Such actions retard the progress of Humanity, 
 though they cannot arrest it : they disappear, perish, and are 
 finally forgotten. There are lives wholly made up of actions 
 such as these. They form no part of Humanity. Humanity 
 consists only of such lives, and only of those parts of each 
 man's life, which are impersonal, which are social, which 
 have converged to the common good. 
 
 Here, then, lies the subject-matter for the final science, 
 that which teaches how, by the clear perception of man's 
 relation to Humanity, to gather up the scattered fragments 
 of his nature and make them one ; like the dry bones of 
 Ezekiel's vision which, at the Divine word, became a living 
 soul. And note that this final Science is at the same time the 
 final Art. It is the meeting point of the profoundest speculation 
 and of the noblest practical effort. The philosopher, as I have 
 said before, after dragging the long chain of abstruse specula- 
 tion through science after science, finds himself at last face to 
 face with the practical problem urged on all hard-working and 
 true men and women, incessantly, in every time and place^ 
 from birth to death : How to guide our life ? What to do ? 
 
 No abstract and general solution is of much avail here. We 
 leave generalities and abstractions ; we have no longer to do^ 
 with men in the mass. Cosmology, Biology, even Sociology 
 are left behind. We have the problem which artists and 
 poets have to handle, and which touches the heart of plain 
 men and women and children, who have neither time nor 
 temper for deep speculation ; we have to do with the infinitely 
 varying phases of character, individuality, circumstance. 
 Homer tells us nothing whatever of man in the abstract : 
 but of this man and that woman ; of Hector and Achilles ; 
 and Helen, and Penelope, and Odysseus. Of the thousand 
 characters of Shakespeare not one is identical with another. 
 The whole art of Education, which our modern machinery 
 of schools and school boards hardly seems as yet to touch, 
 starts from the recognition of these differences. 
 
 How to establish a principle of unity amidst these infinite 
 differences ; how to make men at one with themselves and at 
 one with each other ; this is the final aim of man's effort,, 
 his ultimate problem : and the solution is to be found in- 
 bringing men to see and to feel by every agency possible, by 
 philosophy, by science, by art, by training of every possible 
 kind, their subordination to Humanity. 
 
107 
 
 To go much further into the subject would be impossible; 
 just now. I will only ask the question, Does all this teaching 
 strengthen and enlighten man's sense of duty ? That is the. 
 test question by which every new rule of life is to be judged.. 
 It is the question which we shall do well to ask of all 
 systems of thought, new or old. 
 
 What is duty ? I quote the definition given by Comte's 
 great disciple in Paris, and our teacher lately in this hall,. 
 M. Pierre Laffitte. Duty is a function performed by a free 
 organ. 
 
 The organs of the body are bound to it by indissoluble 
 ties ; they have no independent existence. But the organs 
 of the body politic, while subject to it, are not thus bound to 
 it ; they have a large measure of independent activity. A 
 slave, suppose his slavery to be pushed to the logical ex- 
 treme, can have no duty. An emancipated Russian serf 
 said to his employer,* some years ago, " When I was a serf I , 
 stole always ; it was my only right, my only way of feeling 
 free." Positivists, let me say in passing, attach as great 
 importance to freedom as any school of politicians now living,, 
 and very much more than most. Only it is not for them, 
 as for some, the be-all and end-all of life. A freeman freely 
 acting foolishly is no object of admiration. But without 
 freedom there can be no true virtue, as wise men have: 
 always told us. 
 
 Duty then implies, first of all, the clear perception of man's ' 
 relation to Humanity, as a free organ performing a definite 
 function for the service of the body of which he is a member. 
 But it implies, secondly, the inward impulse of love and rever- 
 ence, urging man to forget self: and in the third place, it 
 implies energy, to carry the action through to the end. In 
 other words, the whole of our threefold nature, made up 
 of Thought, Emotion, and Activity, is concerned in an act of 
 Duty. It is not merely sound reasoning ; it is not merely 
 blind benevolent impulse ; it is not merely resolute activity : 
 it is the union of all three in one. It is the first step towards, 
 that complete unity and harmony of our complex multiform 
 nature which it is man's highest effort to attain, and which 
 when attained, constitutes true happiness. The first step- 
 towards the attainment ; but not as yet the final reaching 
 to the goal. An act of duty implies always at the first a 
 bitter, fierce struggle between the higher and lower elements 
 of the soul; it is long ere the victory is completely won^ 
 And only when the act has become habitual, when the 
 victory is secure, when the lower passions, like subdued 
 rebels, have become at last willing servants, lending their 
 
 * The remark was made to Tourgenieff, from whom the present writer- 
 heard it. 
 
I OS 
 
 stores of force to the higher instincts whose rule they have 
 learnt to recognise, only then is there true unity, only then 
 is there inward peace, and such happiness as the good can 
 feel in a world where there must always be much pain and 
 -sorrow. We come back then to Aristotle's lofty conception ; 
 -happiness is the state or habit of noble activity. 
 
 But then we are told. This teaching is well enough for the 
 few ; it will be listened to by those who already practise it, 
 and therefore do not need it : but how about the rest ? 
 Where is the sanction for your Positivist morality ? 
 
 I ask in return, what do you mean by sanction ? Do you 
 mean, where is the penalty for fear of which, or the reward 
 for the hope of which, you do this, and refrain from doing 
 that ? If this be your meaning, I say first that Pagan Stoics 
 and Christian or Indiati Mystics have always told us that 
 the Love of Virtue, or the Love of God, brings its own 
 reward with it. And if you reply (as you justly may) 
 that the mass of men. Mystic and Stoic included, even 
 though they rise once and again to such sublime moods of 
 devotion, yet in the daily round of life, and in its bitterer 
 trials, need more than this : then, more than this is at hand. 
 To the finer and purer natures in their hour of weakness, the 
 ■approving glance of those they love and reverence is a source 
 of strength. And if this be wanting, yet the trust that work 
 done honestly and bravely will tell in the long run, will be 
 valued by those they leave behind them, will be added in 
 unseen ways to the treasure of Humanity, and will not be 
 lost, is the strongest stimulus of hope; the fear of missing 
 this is the greatest of terrors. To "save the soul" means 
 so to guide the life that this shall be the result. To coarser 
 natures the disapproval of their fellow men is a moral force 
 before- which all but the fiercest audacity breaks down, 
 -even when this blame is vaguely expressed and felt ; and still 
 more when distinctly uttered by an authority recognised by 
 •all as competent and valid, and where, as in the worst cases 
 might be needful, it might be pushed to the extreme limits 
 •of moral or even physical isolation. Finally, for natures 
 wholly rebellious, there remains for the society of the future 
 as for societies of the past, the physical force of government, 
 the strong arm of the law. No ; the want of a due sanction 
 to morality in the religion of the Future is a criticism that 
 will not bear the shallowest examination : rather it might be 
 feared that the sanction would be too strong ; that it might 
 be abused for tyrannical purposes, as the fear of hell in past 
 ages was abused by ambitious bigots ; were it not that in our 
 •case the very strength, or at least the permanence, of the 
 sanction, disappears so soon as it is used unreasonably. 
 
 Still again the objector argues : Granted that free, willing 
 
log 
 
 action, in subordination to the order of Humanity, supplies a 
 sure foundation of morality ; granted that those who have 
 been taught to understand this long, continuous order of 
 development that we call Humanity, will become willing 
 to fall in with it and adjust their lives to it ; yet is not this 
 conception very hard to reach for those who are not his- 
 torians, or philosophers, or scientific students ? How touch 
 the hearts of the vast mass of men with any fire of enthu- 
 siasm for truths, real, no doubt, and certain, but which it 
 takes the deepest thinkers their whole lives to fathom ? 
 
 The answer lies in looking at the widely different ways 
 there are of apprehending truth. Every day on the wide 
 seas at noon thousands of men are using their sextants, and 
 finding out by looking at the sun and at their manuals of 
 navigation, the exact place on the surface of the planet which, 
 their ships have reached. Yet these men are not Galileos, 
 or Keplers, or Newtons ; nor even are they, in general, 
 good mathematicians. They simply recognise the competent 
 authority of the astronomers of Greenwich, and act accord- 
 ingly. That is the way great truths get received and per- 
 meate the world. They are largely accepted on faith by men 
 who find them square with their practical experience. 
 
 And, again, the mistake of the objector lies in supposing 
 that words and the abstract signs of reasoning form the only 
 mode, or the chief mode, of penetrating men with the con- 
 ception of their continuity with the Past. But this is not 
 so, or will not be so. Let us take a glance into the Future, 
 remembering Shakespeare's word that to look after as well as 
 before is the privilege of man. Let us try to imagine some 
 of the great public festivals that Auguste Comte has foretold 
 for the Future of Humanity, so soon as by inward meditation, 
 by careful training of children by Positivist mothers, and by 
 hard continuous work in propagating a broader and nobler 
 standard of thought and feeling throughout Society ; a suffi- 
 ciently large public is prepared for them. For without such 
 preparation they would be empty pageants. 
 
 Take the four festivals marked out for the month dedi- 
 cated to Fetichism ; the Festivals of Animals, of Fire, of the 
 Sun, of Iron. Think of the splendid career opened out to the 
 Berliozes and Wagners of the Future, to painters, sculptors, 
 builders, decorators, as, in due subordination to the poet, they 
 celebrate each in their own way the painful struggles of early 
 man. What a subject for art is man's rivalry with other 
 races, his final victory, and the elevation of the dog and horse 
 from fierce enemies into willing and noble servants ; — or again, 
 what scope for imagination in telling of the humble unknown 
 Prometheus, who brought fire among men firom the earth and 
 from the sky, and by the aid of this subtle spirit gained access 
 
to the hidden virtues of plant and rock. What a theme for 
 poet, artist, and artificer, is the festival of Iron, celebrating 
 the long struggle between the ploughshare and the sword ; 
 noble rivals each with their own great work to do, but the 
 nobler, and the humbler finally victorious. And the festival 
 of the Sun, — how it would unite the earliest devotion of 
 -Sun-worshippers with the most recent revelations of science ! 
 since for modern no less than for ancient the sun is the foun- 
 tain of life and energy. Passing to another theme, think what 
 vividness and what reality the Feast of Salamis would give 
 to the splendid struggle which saved for mankind the inesti- 
 mable treasures of Greek science, philosophy, and art ; with- 
 out which Thales, Pythagoras, ^schylus, Phidias, Aristotle, 
 Archimedes, would be unheard or unborn names for us. I 
 give these as isolated instances ; but imagine the time when 
 the eighty-one festivals, glorifying the most precious posses- 
 sions of Humanity and the noblest work of her servants, shall 
 bring the whole beautiful story before the hearts of men, not 
 in printed books or lectures, but in song and music, in sound 
 and color and form, with all the resources of artist and 
 skilled artificer no longer wasted on luxurious decorations of 
 noblemen's and tradesmen's palaces, but devoted to the public 
 service of the whole united people ; and I ask. Would not the 
 religion of Humanity call forth devotion as real and as heart- 
 felt as when the mystic veil was borne by white-robed virgins 
 to Athena's shrine, or when the worshippers of Corpus Christi 
 in the public squares of Seville and Toledo listened and 
 looked at the sacred dramas of Calderon ? 
 
 It is needful to think of such things ; although we know 
 well that as we leave this room to-night we shall pass within 
 a few yards of many haunts of misery, and sorrow, and 
 degradation ; for we are bound to know this, and never forget 
 it, and do what we can to better it. Our work lies in the 
 present, not in the golden, glowing future. Yet hope and 
 heart would fail us were we not to feel that we are one with 
 that Future, as we are one with the glorious Past. 
 
 It is not then impossible, on the contrary it will be easy in 
 future times, even though now it be hard, to penetrate all 
 men, women, and children born upon this planet with a vivid 
 operative belief in Humanity as the power supreme over 
 human life. The belief will spread, because it is real and 
 true ; because it gathers up our scattered thoughts, activities, 
 •and feelings, round a common centre ; because it stimulates 
 new effort for perfection without sacrificing the Order which 
 is our heritage from the Past ; because by reducing the 
 warring elements of the soul to harmony, not crushing the 
 lower, but leading them to serve the higher, it helps men to 
 reach that inward peace which passes understanding. 
 
VI. 
 
 COMTE : THE SUCCESSOR OF 
 ARISTOTLE AND ST. PAUL. 
 
Comte: The Successor of Aristotle and 
 St. Paul.* 
 
 24 GUTENBERG 95. 
 
 5 September, 1883. 
 
 The Principle, Love ; — 
 The Basis, Order ; — 
 The End, Progress. 
 
 I HAVE heard of countries where the repetition of a form 
 many hundreds of times has led to actual forgetfulness 
 of what the words' meant, so that it has become, in the 
 truest sense, dead language. This is why it seems well, 
 now and then, to translate this beautiful formula of Posi- 
 tivism, at the risk of diluting it, in some such way as 
 this: 
 
 The highest source of action is unselfish sympathy : 
 
 The surest mode of action is to study the realities of the World 
 
 and of life, and guide ourselves accordingly : 
 
 The highest aim of action is so to strive after perfection, that 
 
 the World may he somewhat better for our having lived in it. 
 
 This morning the disciples of Auguste Comte in Paris met 
 in the cemetery of Pdre-la-Chaise, and stood by his tomb 
 while a few words were said in honour of the dead, in 
 thankful recognition of his glorious work, in affectionate 
 remembrance of those who had strengthened and purified 
 his energies by loving help. This afternoon, in the house 
 and in the very room where he lived and worked, M. 
 Laffitte, Comte's chief disciplcj and his successor, has com- 
 memorated the master's work by applying his principles to 
 
 * A Discourse given at Newton Hall, Fetter Lane, September 5th, 1883 
 (the twenty-sixth anniversary of his death). 
 
 113 I 
 
114 
 
 some great problems of our time. This evening they will 
 meet again, as we hope to do here, to enjoy and profit by 
 the influences which social union brings to bear upon a 
 common work. 
 
 To-day for the first time the anniversary of Comte's death 
 is commemorated in this hall. Let us try to form some 
 clear conception of the work which he did, and of the way 
 in which each one of us can help it on. 
 
 The time is drawing near when France and Europe will 
 celebrate the centenary of the Revolution. It will bring to 
 a close, as you know, the first century of the Positivist era. 
 The importance of this era has been contested. But it will 
 not be forgotten that on the evening of Valmy, the first 
 occasion on which the new Republic had made the old 
 monarchies feel its force, Gothe said to the officers round 
 him, " This day has begun a new epoch in the world's his- 
 tory, and you can all say that you were present at its birth." 
 The key-note of Positivism is struck by accepting such a 
 starting-point as this. We augur from it, at once, two 
 things : first, that, whether Positivism be a philosophy or 
 not, it is much more than a philosophy : it is no abstract 
 metaphysical system, but a doctrine dealing with the facts 
 of man's life, and the structure of society; and, secondly, 
 that it deals with those facts on principles widely different 
 from those of the Catholic Church. 
 
 It was in the ninth year of this new era, in the South 
 of France, at Montpelier, that Auguste Comte was born. 
 By that time the fervour of enthusiasm with which the 
 outbreak of the Revolution had been heralded had grown 
 cold and grey. The doctrines of Rousseau and Voltaire, 
 for thirty years the standard round which the haters 
 of injustice rallied, in the New World as well as in 
 the Old, had shown themselves powerful to destroy a 
 hateful prison, but impotent to build the humblest cot- 
 tage. Miserable passions had been unchained, and, under 
 the baneful leadership of Napoleon, had thrown Europe 
 into uproar. The old Church and the old State rallied their 
 forces, and their yoke was accepted by some with blind 
 enthusiasm, by others with covetous satisfaction, and by 
 the mass with the passive weariness of despair. The noblest 
 spirits of the time were struck dumb, or crushed into silence. 
 Shelley and Byron were driven into exile. Wordsworth's 
 genius shrank and withered within his hermitage. 
 
 Such was the moral atmosphere during Comte's child- 
 hood and youth. His mother was a pious Catholic; his 
 first teacher of any importance waS Daniel Encontre, a Pro- 
 testant pastor, a man obscure in his generation, but of 
 whose moral worth and intrinsic powers of thought Comte 
 
"5 
 
 thought so highly that he dedicated to him the last volume 
 that he lived to write. At a very early age the boy felt the 
 influences of the time. His theological faith left him ; he 
 joined the great scientific school of Paris, the Ecole Poly- 
 technique, where he took part, as a lad of sixteen, in the 
 defence of Paris against the allied armies. Papers and 
 letters that M. LafStte has been carefully collecting show 
 ■that from this time onward Science and Politics divided 
 his mind, till the time came when the two currents flowed 
 in one. 
 
 As a young man of twenty,, he came for a few years 
 tinder the influence of Saint Simon, to whom he gave, how- 
 ever, much more than he received. On the vital question, 
 whether mechanical and industrial changes were sufficient 
 for the cure of social evils, they separated. Saint Simon 
 founded the school to which we owe the Suez Canal and 
 the French Treaty. Comte, not at all inclined to doubt 
 the importance of such things, remained profoundly con- 
 vinced that without solid convictions on moral and social 
 facts, no mechanical changes could be of real avail, and 
 even might in many cases be profoundly mischievous. To 
 the establishment of such convictions, therefore, he set 
 himself, concentrating on the work the scientific powers 
 which the greatest biologist of his time, Blainville, and 
 the greatest mathematician, Fourier, had amply recognised. 
 On that foundation he built up an ideal of life towards 
 which all men and women to whom theological dogmas 
 had become unmeaning could strive. That ideal he called 
 the Religion of Humanity. Comte died in Paris on the 
 5th September, 1857, twenty-six years ago. 
 
 He said, toward the end of his life, that the aim of it had 
 been to combine the work of Aristotle with the work of 
 St. Paul. Let us see what these words mean. 
 
 The free exercise of intellectual power, independent of 
 theology, independent of practical material utility, began 
 with the group of remarkable men who appeared here and 
 there in the islands and coastlands of the Grecian world, 
 from the seventh century before Christ to the time when 
 the city of Alexander became a Christian town. Thales 
 represents the beginning of this movement, Hipparchus 
 the last stage of its full vigour. These men stood, each of 
 them, somewhat alone in his generation. They exercised 
 with one remarkable exception, that of Pythagoras, but a 
 slight influence on the society around them. They may 
 Ije said, perhaps, even to have injured that society some- 
 what, by diverting into alien channels sources of spiritual 
 vigour that might otherwise have saved it from decay. 
 ■They Uved not for their country, but for mankind. They 
 
ii6 
 
 gave meaning and purpose to the Roman Empire ; and 
 when the fulness of time came, they were seen to have 
 prepared the way for the final triumph of Humanity. 
 
 Of this group of remarkable men, Aristotle, by the 
 common assent of mankind, is held the chief. Not that 
 he was so looked at in his own time, or in the times that 
 immediately followed. The great materiahst Epicurus, who 
 thought that he could explain the universe by the free 
 motions of atoms, won such enthusiastic admiration in the 
 Greco-Roman world as Aristotle never obtained. No- 
 Lucretius sang Aristotle's praise. 
 
 But the time came, many centuries after he was dead, 
 when he was seen to be the central figure among Greek 
 thinkers — towering above them all, as Shakespeare was at 
 last seen to tower above the great dramatists who surrounded 
 him. He is the one amongst them whose originality is 
 unexhausted ; to whom men come back still after more than 
 two thousand years have past, for new treasure. In Dante's 
 poem he is the Master of those who know : five centuries 
 afterwards, Auguste Comte calls him the Eternal prince of 
 true thinkers. 
 
 If in the limits of a sentence it were possible to say, 
 Why is Aristotle held to be so great ? the reply would be : 
 First, he had a juster insight than other philosophers of 
 the limits within which speculation is possible or wise ; 
 Secondly, within those limits he surveyed the whole en- 
 closure more completely than other men. _ In other words, 
 Aristotle was in very many respects a Positive thinker, bom 
 out of due time. He was no metaphysical dreamer, but a 
 man of science ; not, however, limiting himself to a special 
 study, but embracing the whole sphere of positive thought. 
 Plato described the soul transcending the world of sense, and 
 living in a sublimer world of spiritual abstractions : Epicurus 
 span from his brain brilliant explanations of the origin of 
 life and matter from primitive atoms. Aristotle strove to 
 look at things as they were, and to see how they worked. 
 He dealt with all facts that came within his range : the facts 
 of matter, the facts of living bodies, the facts of human 
 societies. Always his aim was the same — to find the law ; 
 that is, among the mass of special details, to find the general 
 fact, the essential mode and principle of working. 
 
 Now, in the interval of more than two thousand years 
 between Aristotle and Auguste Comte, we may seek in vain 
 for any thinker who combined, so completely, the scientific 
 spirit with universality of view. There were men of science 
 in abundance, such as Archimedes, Hipparchus, Kepler, 
 Galileo, Newton ; there were comprehensive thinkers in 
 abundance, such as Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Leibnitz^ 
 
Kant, and their colleagues. But the men of science were 
 •absorbed in some special branch of it, as Mathematics, or 
 Physics, or Biology: and the comprehensive thinkers could 
 find no link to bind their thoughts together except in 
 speculations upon the divine essence, or on the origin of 
 matter, or upon their own internal consciousness. Comte 
 •alone found the link by which the different branches 
 of science could be brought together and moulded into a 
 harmonious whole, without transgressing the limits of scien- 
 tific thought — in other words, the limits of regulated and 
 •developed common sense. The link which Comte found, and 
 which binds together the Positive Philosophy, is the life 
 and growth of Humanity. 
 
 Now to most men and women the word Philosophy is 
 a dry and unmeaning word. When they hear of a man 
 devoting himself to Philosophy, they think of him as given 
 over to a hobby like chess-playing, or floriculture, or the col- 
 lection of curiosities. Only a few who go below the surface of 
 things judge differently. These know that in the long run, 
 though not immediatel}', the world is governed by ideas. 
 The great ship of life, though driven by the winds of passion, 
 is steered by the slight - looking, hardly visible, helm of 
 thought. This the Jesuits knew when they strove to ex- 
 tinguish Galileo. This the French noblesse of the i8th 
 century did not know when they patronised Voltaire and 
 Diderot. The battles of creeds are no mere tournaments of 
 pedants. They are the decisive battles of the world. 
 
 And Comte knew this also when, amidst the desolate still- 
 ness that followed the revolutionary hurricane, he sought 
 some firm anchorage, some solid foundation, on which the 
 work of reconstruction might begin. What common con- 
 victions were possible to men by whom the assertion and 
 the denial of the Christian creed had both been tried, and 
 had both been found wanting ? In politics, too, what had 
 been the result of the sanguinary duel between the divine 
 right of kings and nobles and the abstract right's of man ? 
 The first had come back to life, though thrice slain, because 
 the last had shown themselves so barren. Has the Sove- 
 reignty of the People, and the Equality at birth of every 
 citizen, prevented the rise of American millionaires, the new 
 and formidable plutocracy of the future ? 
 
 In the shifting chaos of opinion, Comte saw one fixed 
 point, and one only. This was the readiness of all intelli- 
 gent men to accept the conclusions of science without them- 
 selves passing through all the steps of proof. Men find firm 
 ground for agreement in the truths of arithmetic and geome- 
 try ; they see the elementary truths at first-hand ; the more 
 hidden and complicated truths they take on trust from com- 
 
petent men who have followed the same path, and have gone- 
 further along it. So that all of us have come to believe in 
 the rotation of the earth and its annual motion round the 
 sun ; though not one in twenty thousand of us could state 
 the chain of proof on which these discoveries depend. 
 
 Is there nothing like this in the world of man's private 
 and public life ? Are there no facts and no principles in the 
 moral and political world as certain as facts of geometry and 
 facts of biology ? Is there not a science of social structure; 
 and growth as there is a science of man's bodily structure 
 and growth ? 
 
 Men of old looked at the sun, and moon, and stars, and 
 thought them inhabited by superhuman beings of like 
 passions with man. A vast change has come over their way 
 of looking at these facts. We now seek to know and to fore- 
 see the way in which these planets move ; and by this know- 
 ledge and foreknowledge we guide our action. Is it not so- 
 with the facts of the moral and political world ? Theological 
 explanations of man's life have grown obsolete for many of 
 us : neither the Bible nor the Church can satisfy us any 
 more ; still less can we be satisfied by the most conclusive 
 refutations of the Church and the Bible. What we want is- 
 to look straight at the facts of man's moral and social life, to 
 find out what its actual powers, faculties, possibilities are, 
 and then to guide our life accordingly. 
 
 For fourteen years Comte devoted the whole forces of his 
 spirit to the foundation and development of this science of 
 human life. His aim was not merely to establish it as a 
 distinct science, but to bring it into line with the other 
 recognised sciences, to show that, being once established, it 
 must inevitably take its place as the central point towards- 
 which they converged, as the link which held them together. 
 
 The first three of the six volumes are devoted (i) to the 
 laws of number, space, and movement — Mathematics ; (2) 
 the laws of matter — Physics and Chemistry ; (3) the laws of 
 living matter — Biology. Then in the last three volumes he 
 deals with that one amongst the higher animals that has lived 
 in community for countless centuries. Here we reach the- 
 science of Sociology ; we study the laws of that con- 
 tinuous social action by which the conduct, of each one of us- 
 is moulded. 
 
 I must say very little more as to this first part of Comte's- 
 life and work. Two features of it only will I note. 
 
 First, I call attention to the stern severity with which 
 Comte held in check the pretensions of men of science to- 
 knowledge which they did not possess, giving out for certain 
 what perhaps for ever may remain uncertain, and thus- 
 relapsing by a new path into the old blunder of making the 
 
human mind the measure of the universe. We look at that 
 little part of nature's working that goes on within our 
 limited ken, and rush to the conclusion that things were 
 always and everywhere so, and will be so everywhere and 
 always. We find out the law by which the moon travels 
 round the earth and the planets round the sun, and which 
 holds good perhaps of two or three stellar systems near about 
 us, and we assume that all through the boundless universe 
 the. same thing holds. We see certain processes of evolution 
 of life going on around us, and in the few millenniums before 
 us, and we assume that we know all about the origin of life 
 upon the earth, and can explain all living forms. ■■'Let 
 me illustrate by one very simple example the error I am 
 speaking of. It is a common rule that bodies expand with 
 heat and contract with cold. Pour hot water into a tube, and 
 as the water cools it sinks lower. One who watches this for 
 the first time might say : Here, then, is a law of nature. 
 From a hundred degrees of heat to eighty degrees, the water 
 sinks in the tube so much. From eighty degrees to sixty 
 degrees so much. Therefore it will always go on sinking until 
 it freezes. And there he might be satisfied, unless he pushed 
 the trial further. In that case he would find that when he 
 gets beyond forty degrees, that the water no longer shrinks, it 
 swells. His first law of nature turns out to be no absolute law 
 at all. You will easily point the moral when reading many 
 modern disquisitions as to what happened on this planet many 
 millions of years ago, or as to what is now happening in the 
 fixed stars. Comte's philosophy is, I repeat, most salutary 
 discipline for those who believe that the day is near at hand 
 when science will explain the universe. 
 
 I think that all this side of Comte's teaching will be best 
 understood by those who read again the Sartor Resartus of 
 Carlyle. Let me quote a few words from this masterpiece : — 
 
 " Is it not the deepest Law of Nature that she be con- 
 stant ? cries an illuminated class. Is not the machine of the 
 Universe fixed to move by unalterable rules ? Probable 
 enough, good friends .... but now of you I make the old 
 enquiry, what those same unalterable rules, forming the 
 complete Statute-book of Nature, may possibly be ? They 
 stand written in our works of science, say you ; in the accu- 
 mulated records of man's experience ? Was man, with all 
 his experience, present at the Creation, then, to see how it all 
 went on ? Have any deepest scientific individuals yet dived 
 down to the foundations of the Universe, and gauged every- 
 thing there ? Alas ! not in any wise. These scientific indi- 
 viduals have been nowhere but where we also are, have seen 
 some handbreadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is 
 infinite, without bottom as without shore ". 
 
120 
 
 Such thoughts as these are hardly meant for language, or 
 at least for the briefest and the simplest. There is no need 
 for many long words to tell us that our knowledge is to pur 
 ignorance as a speck of dust to the Himalaya mountains. 
 We might easily waste time in saying this too often. Once 
 said is enough, if only it is always felt. No need to call it 
 from the background of silence, unless when we see intellect 
 in full rebellion, and maintaining mad claims to absolute 
 supremacy and independence of social duty. Then, indeed, 
 it becomes imperatively necessary to remind men that our 
 widest knowledge, like our noblest traditions and our highest 
 hopes, are but a " kindly light leading us on amidst the 
 encircling gloom ". 
 
 Then, if Mathematics and Biology cannot explain the 
 universe, cannot even explain the facts of human life, why 
 did Comte so value them ? 
 
 Because these lower sciences prepared the way for the 
 higher. They gave the method, and the mental discipline, 
 exercising us for tasks more arduous than their own, enabling 
 us to distinguish, in the more difficult and intricate world of 
 human conduct, the certain from the uncertain, the false from 
 the true. Scientific study of the world prepares the way for 
 scientific study' of human life. 
 
 These six volumes of the Philosophie Positive represent, I 
 have said, that half of Comte's life which is akin to Aristotle's. 
 The pretension is a high one, and I cannot 'J)retend to justify 
 it here or now. But I will simply say again that Comte is 
 distinguished from the philosophers of modern Europe as 
 Aristotle from those of Greece, first by comprehensiveness, 
 and secondly by rigid discipline and self-control. In Comte, 
 as in Aristotle, there was no attempt to explain the universe, 
 or to describe, like Epicurus, the phases of evolution millions 
 of years before Man was there to see them. It was an 
 attempt to look the facts of nature and of life in the face, 
 dealing with each group of facts in its own way, ranging 
 them in orderly succession from the simplest facts of space 
 and number to the highest and most complex facts of 
 human life, and thus preparing the way for the advent of the 
 new spiritual pOwer. And by this Comte meant no theo- 
 cratic priesthood, but a body of men who, without any 
 mystical claims or apostolical succession whatsoever, should 
 speak to their fellow men upon the tangled problems of 
 human life with the authority of experts, with the same kind 
 of authority which students of any branch of knowledge, or 
 practitioners of any art — physicians, lawyers, engineers, 
 architects — m.ay claim in their own sphere of study. 
 
 After Aristotle came St. Paul. For most people, and for 
 religious people especially, these names seem to have no 
 
kind of connection with each other, to belong to different 
 worlds. Yet for us it is not so at all. Had it not been for 
 the intellectual movement of Greece, culminating in Aristotle, 
 ■and for the practical activity of Rome, culminating in the 
 Empire under Julius Caesar and his successors, the Christian 
 Church would never have arisen. I do not attempt proof of 
 this at the present moment. I merely state the conclusion 
 which those who accept Comte's philosophy of history, and, 
 indeed, which framers of any philosophy of history, have 
 long ago reached. 
 
 What, so far as a few words can define it, was the work 
 •done by the founder of the Catholic Church ? for no less a 
 title than this do we give to St. Paul. Let us, for a moment, 
 strip off from the work he did everything that is super- 
 natural, theological, controversial, and look at the bare 
 human facts of the case. In an age of scepticisni and of 
 material comfort,^the first due to Greek philosophy, and 
 the second to the imperial civilisation of Rome, which had 
 established universal peace, — an obscure society arose and 
 spread in the back streets of Rome, and along the coasts 
 of Asia Minor and the Greek mainland ; holding aloof 
 from intellectual culture and political activity ; and con- 
 centrating its whole energy on the attainment of moral 
 purity, in expectation of speedy translation to a higher life 
 in heaven, or of the advent, within a few years, of a millen- 
 niuui on earth. I say nothing now of the doctrine that 
 held this society together ; I dwell simply on the fact that 
 here was a society, outside the limits of language and 
 country, consisting at first of poor men, many of them 
 Ignorant, many of them slaves, devoted to the work of leading 
 a pure life on earth in expectation of future bliss. As time 
 went on, the leaders of this society became a great force 
 within the state, keeping in check the brute forces of military 
 ambition, civilising barbarous tribes, and exercising a strong 
 moral discipline over the acts of private life. Gradually 
 other influences came in : Greece and Rome reasserted 
 their claims. But I speak of St. Paul's work so far as it can 
 be looked at separately from those claims ; apart from what 
 is due to Charlemagne and Feudalism, to Dante and the 
 Renaissance of Art, to Gutenberg and modern Industry ; 
 apart from Newton and Lavoisier ; apart from Voltaire and 
 other apostles of free-thought and tolerance. All these 
 things, or many of them, the Catholic Church is apt to claim 
 as her own offspring. But that claim we cannot admit ; 
 these things, if we trace them back to their sources, have a 
 far older origin than the Christian. Archimedes, Aristotle, 
 Caesar, have more to do with them than St. Paul. The 
 ■Christian Church has had to leave these things outside her 
 
122 
 
 pale. They have been sometimes forced on her acceptance, 
 but she had not initiated them. 
 
 The work of St. Paul is very clearly defined. He is the 
 true founder of the Catholic Church. Unbiased search into 
 the documents makes it clear that but for him the followers 
 of Jesus would have remained a Jewish sect. St. Paul it was 
 who founded that society of men and women, of different 
 countries and languages, of every rank and occupation, 
 entirely unconnected with any government, devoted to 
 the work of leading a pure, righteous and unselfish life, 
 which men call the Catholic Church. I say nothing now 
 of their doctrine or of their hope of future reward ; I speak 
 merely of what to us is the essential part of the work. And 
 I say, first, that nothing like this ever had been seen in 
 the world before. There had been national religions, with 
 priesthoods and ceremonies, acting more or less on the 
 national life ; but never a Church, standing outside the 
 nation, embracing many nations, and moulding their life. 
 And, secondly, I say that this institution, once arisen, 
 corresponds to a permanent need of human life. The work 
 of St. Paul, transformed like other human conceptions from 
 the theological to the positive shape — adapted, that is to 
 say, to modern conditions of belief — belongs not to the Past 
 only, but also and still more to the Future of Man. 
 
 Now, this is the point which Auguste Comte was the 
 first to see and to act on. 
 
 He had systematised human knowledge on a sounder 
 basis than anyone since Aristotle. This was the first part 
 of his life ; and this, as may be supposed, was the only part 
 that received recognition from the literary world. Men of 
 literary and scientific culture, without social enthusiasm, 
 had entirely mistaken his purpose. It is true that the 
 Philosophie Positive, regarded simply as a monument of 
 speculative work, was the most genuine and enduring that 
 had been produced since Aristotle. But it was not done 
 for speculation's sake. Throughout every page of it, through 
 all the geometry, physics, chemistry, biology — for those who 
 read between the lines — lies the purpose of reaching the 
 firm basis of conviction and principle on whjch the reorgan- 
 isation of Western Society might be carried on. In Corhte 
 the Speculator and the Citizen, the Roman and the Greek, 
 were fused together. Such a thing the world had never seen 
 before. 
 
 Yet one thing seemed wanting. And this thing was sO' 
 vast and wide that many good men, and even more good, 
 women, would say that while it was wanting, all that had. 
 been done was but vanity. And although this would be a 
 grievous exaggeration, yet it would be true to say that if 
 
Comte's life had stopt short, in 1842, with the publication of 
 the sixth volume of the PMlosophie Positive, he had, indeed, 
 delivered a message to philosophers and to statesmen of 
 inestimable value ; but for the mass of hard-working men 
 men and women in the world, he had said nothing. His life 
 had been one of pain, and struggle, and isolation within and 
 without ; he had lived from youth upwards in the atmosphere 
 of revolution and doubt — in it, though not of it — working his- 
 way upward, and paving the way for others after him, to an 
 atmosphere of a very different kind. The scientific men to- 
 whom he had appealed for aid deserted him as soon as 
 they saw whither he was leading them ; and when it be- 
 came unmistakably clear that his whole life was a ser- 
 mon on the text. Science is great and high, but the conduct 
 of human life is higher and greater, an unworthy cabal 
 had been formed to deprive him of his livelihood. Finally, 
 the marriage which, against the will of his family, he had 
 contracted in early life, proved utterly disastrous, and ended, 
 as it could not but end, in separation. Amidst all this, his 
 life had been one of incessant and heroic toil nobly undergone. 
 His official work, as a public and private teacher, had been 
 done with the most scrupulous conscientiousness. Those 
 who have read of the Stoic life of the great German philoso- 
 pher Kant, may form from it some picture of the life of 
 Comte, as it seemed to outside observers. Only to a few was 
 it known that a grave and silent manner veiled a nature of 
 _ passionate tenderness. 
 
 1 Of Comte's friendship with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, 
 lasting during the nine months that remained of her life and 
 the twelve years of his own, it is best to speak in his own 
 words, and these are to be found in the Dedication and 
 Invocation with which the Positive Polity begins and ends. 
 She had made him, he says, more loving and more pure. He 
 does not pretend that she brought him new ideas. What he 
 does say is, that through her influence new ideas grew up 
 within him, which otherwise would have lain frozen in their 
 germ. What he came to see was, that to be made more 
 loving and more pure was a gift compared with which the 
 gain of any new "ideas whatsoever weighed but lightly in the 
 balance. 
 
 If I were to speak, in my own words, of the renovation 
 which was thus wrought in Comte's nature, I should say 
 that it lay in this, that the moral realities of human life were 
 brought nearer to him. Society was no longer a distant 
 object pursuing its way through the Ether in obedience to> 
 a fixed law. It was a complex of human lives, each real, 
 intense, swayed by keen, stirring desires ; needing guidance,, 
 support, consolation. 
 
124 
 
 He had seen life as a wise philosopher sees it, from a 
 ■distant height, as in a bird's-eye view. He now saw it also 
 as a good and merciful woman sees it, near by, at first hand, 
 glowing with warm blood, quivering with pain and passion. 
 His abstract thoughts translated themselves into the language 
 of human life. And side by side with this change of mental 
 i;one there went a moral change. He became, he says, 
 " more affectionate to his friends, more indulgent to his 
 enemies, more gentle to his inferiors, more submissive to 
 those above him." 
 
 Under these influences, in solitude no longer cold and 
 barren, but illumined by blessed memories, the great work 
 •of his life, the Positive Polity, was written. 
 
 How, in a word, can we describe the purpose of the 
 Positive Polity ? It is a putting together of the principles 
 that serve for the guidance of human life. Some of the best 
 women and men of our time will teH us we have these 
 principles in the New Testament, and in the teaching of the 
 Catholic Church. To which we answer, So far as you can 
 find them there, we can find them there too. St. Paul's 
 glowing picture of the ideal temper is for us as sacred as 
 for you. Let us look at it for a moment. When St. Paul ' 
 was surrounded by jangling and hot-headed sectaries, each 
 full of his own mode of teaching and preaching, and 
 •expecting all others to give way to it, he said: All these 
 things are good, but I show you a more excellent way. 
 And then he painted^ his immortal picture of the patient, 
 rforbearing, loving spirit which, as it seemed to him, tran- 
 scended in importance all dogma whatsoever. " There 
 abideth faith, hope, love; but the greatest of these is love." 
 
 Now, we say to the Christian world. We accept this prin- 
 ciple of the subordination of faith to love, of the intellect to 
 the heart. That whole thirteenth chapter of the First 
 Epistle to the Corinthian Church is for us, and will remain 
 •for ever, the noblest of Positivist hymns. There is not a 
 syllable in it which jars upon us, or which implies the belief 
 in any dogma which we cannot accept. But it is permitted 
 us to ask whether the history of the Christian Church shows 
 that it has ever been sincerely accepted, ' The etymology 
 ■of the word miscreant, misbeliever, connecting moral baseness 
 with heterodoxy, such wars as those of the Thirty Years', 
 such institutions as the Spanish Inquisition, such modern 
 signs as the persecution of the j[ews in Hungary, and, I must 
 add, as the persistent blackening by the religious world of 
 Mr. Bradlaugh's character in England, would seem to show 
 that Faith is still regarded by the religious world — St. Paul 
 notwithstanding — as more important than Love. If I were 
 asked who, of all men known to us, had most fully realised 
 
125 
 
 the temper of that ideal poem, the two names that would 
 occur to me would be not Christian names at all, but Marcus- 
 Aurelius and Vauvenargues : the first a Pagan, the last the 
 cherished friend of Voltaire. 
 
 I take this merely as a sample. Of not many principles- 
 put forward by Auguste Comte, for the conduct of life, can 
 it be said that they are new. That is not wanted. What 
 is needful is, that they should be'real, true, beneficent. The- 
 stones of St. Paul's Cathedral are as ancient as the hills they 
 came from : what the great builder did was to pile them up- 
 and bind them together into a noble temple. 
 
 The whole essence of Positivism lies here. The old al- 
 chemists of the dark ages had many wonderful beliefs about 
 the philosopher's stone, and the elixir of life, and the magical 
 properties of mercury in transmuting baser metals into silver 
 and gold. But they laid the foundations of our modern 
 chemistry. And we thankfully accept their chemistry, 
 though we- leave their alchemy aside. And so it is with the 
 facts of human nature and conduct. Here it is the theo- 
 logians who have laid the first foundations of what we know ; 
 and are we to reject them because what is eternally true is 
 mixed up with mystical creeds with which we have nothing 
 more to do ? Are we to reject Paul's noble hymn to Charity — 
 foretaste, as it is, of the best and purest teaching of the 
 nineteenth century — because, two chapters afterwards, he 
 goes on to tell us that there can be no morality unless we 
 believe in the resurrection from the dead ? I think not. 
 I think the spirit of Positivism is to take truth wherever it is 
 to be found, no matter what its source may be ; to value it for 
 its own sake, and for its bearing upon the most cogent facts 
 of human life. And those truths that bear upon the impulses 
 that prompt right conduct and wrong are, for the Positivist, 
 far the most important truths of all. 
 
 In every science the first point is to get at the facts. And 
 where are the facts in this case ? The scientific world,, 
 strictly so called, is apt to leave them aside, because it does- 
 not quite know what to do with them it cannot subject them 
 to precise measurement. And yet, though unweighed in any 
 balance, they are as. real, as pressing, as tangible as the 
 earth's motions, or the circulation of the blood, or the course- 
 of electric currents. The facts He ready to hand everywhere, 
 if we have but eyes to see them, in the prejudices, passions, 
 and struggles that we know of in our own lives, or that we see 
 in those around us. Only we must have eyes to see these 
 facts. They are none the less reai because we cannot measure 
 them with compasses, or weigh them in the scales of the labo- 
 ratory. And hitherto the men who have told us most that 
 is worth hearing about them are not the mathematicians. 
 
126 
 
 or biologists, but mystics and religious teachers like Buddha, 
 and Isaiah, and Paul, and Mahomet, and Thomas a Kempis; 
 or again, such poets as Homer, ^schylus, Dante, and 
 Shakespeare. Are we to leave off reading Homer because 
 the gods have left Olympus ? As little shall we cease to read 
 St. Paul's Epistles or the Imitation or the Pilgrim's Progress, 
 though the Nicene Creed and the Thirty-nine Articles have 
 become a dead letter for us. The husk is stripped from the 
 bud, but the green leaf and life are but the brighter and 
 stronger. These things are as sacred to us as to those who 
 heard the words first spoken. The very essence of our creed 
 is that, in an age of mechanism and wealth-hunting, we strive 
 to keep the consciousness of these things alive. All this 
 treasure is ours, if we will only take it. 
 
 Let me use, again, Carlyle's words — words never pub- 
 lished till they appeared in the second volume of Mr. 
 Fronde's biography : — 
 
 " The primary conception, by rude nations, in regard to 
 all great attainments and achievements by men is, that 
 each was a miracle and the gift of the gods. Language 
 was taught men by a heavenly power. Minerva gave him 
 the olive, Neptune the horse. Triptolemus taught him 
 agriculture, etc. The effect of optics in this strange camera 
 obscura of our Existence is most of all singular. The 
 ^rand centre of the modern revolution of ideas is ever 
 this — We begin to have a notion that all this is the effect 
 of optics, and that the- intrinsic fact is very different from 
 our own conception of it. Not less miraculous — not less 
 divine — but with an altogether totally new (or hitherto 
 unconceived) species of divineness — a divineness lying much 
 nearer home than formerly : a divineness that does not come 
 from Judea, from Olympus, Asgard, Mount Meru, but is 
 in man himself — in the heart of every one born of man — 
 a grand revolution, indeed, which is altering our ideas of 
 heaven and earth to an amazing extent, in every particular 
 whatsoever. From top to bottom our spiritual world, and all 
 that depends on the same, which means nearly everything 
 in the furniture of our life, outward as well as inward, is as this 
 idea advances undergoing change of the most essential sort, 
 is slowly getting overturned, as they angrily say, which, in the 
 sense of being gradually turned over and having its vertex set 
 where its base used to be, is indisputably true, and means a 
 revolution such as never was before, or at least since letters 
 and recorded history existed among us never was. The great 
 Galileo and numerous small Galileos have appeared in our 
 spiritual world, too, and are making known to us that the 
 sun stands still ; that 'as for the sun, and stars, and eternal 
 immensities, they do not move at all, and, indeed, have some- 
 
127 
 
 thing else to do than dance round the like of us and our 
 paltry little dog-hutch of a dwelling place ; that it is we and 
 our dog-hutch that are moving all this while, giving rise to 
 such phenomena ; and that if we would ever be wise about 
 
 ■out situation, we must now attend to that fact 
 
 " God, heaven, hell, are none of them annihilated for us 
 any more than the material woods and houses. Nothing 
 that was divine, sublime, demonic, beautiful, or terrible is 
 in the least abolished for us, as the poor pre-Galileo fancied 
 
 it might be Old piety was wont to say that God's 
 
 judgments tracked the footsteps of the criminal ; that all 
 violation of the eternal laws done in the deepest recesses, or 
 on the conspicuous high places of the world, was absolutely 
 certain of its punishment. You xjould do no evil, you could 
 do no good, but a God would repay it to you 
 
 " It well behoves us to reflect how true, essentially, all 
 this still is ; that it still continues and will continue funda- 
 mentally a fact in all essential particulars He that 
 
 has with his eyes and soul looked into nature from any point, 
 and not merely into distracted theological, metaphysical, 
 modern philosophical, or other cobweb representations of 
 nature at second-hand, will find this true : that only the 
 vesture of it is changed for us ; that the essence of it cannot 
 •change at all. Banish all miracles from it ; do not name 
 the name of God : it is still true." 
 
 I come back, then, to the great foundation of St. Paul : 
 the institution of the Church ; a society overstepping the 
 limits of family and of country, and devoted to the work of 
 making human life noble and righteous ; of bringing moral 
 pressure to bear on every kind , of self-seeking impulse ; of 
 keeping alive the conscience of men and of nations. I say, 
 this lofty and beneficent conception which St. Paul gave 
 his life to realise, once arisen on the earth, will not perish ; 
 it will outlast the mystical or metaphysical creeds which 
 accompanied its birth ; it will be handed down to future 
 generations in new forms adapted to new modes of thought. 
 
 It seems, then, we shall be told, that what you offer us is 
 Christianity without its creeds. Yes, this ; but also much 
 more than this. 
 
 I have spoken of Comte as fusing into one the work of 
 Aristotle and St. Paul. Transcendent as this praise is, it 
 falls short of the truth. It would be more adequate to say 
 that the ideal of life which he put forward was the union 
 of these two 'types with a third : the union of Greek thought 
 and Christian emotion with Roman energy. Admit that so 
 perfect a type is ideal, and that it has never been realised. 
 We are not here to contend, for a moment, that Auguste 
 Comte was that shadowy and colourless thing, a perfect and 
 
128 
 
 faultless human being. He had the faults and weaknesses- 
 of other men. But I say that I look in vain through history 
 for any one who came so near to realising this threefold ideal, 
 Greek, Roman, or Christian ; or who so clearly held it out 
 for other men to follow. It is admitted that in the Gospels 
 and Epistles of the New Testament there is as little said 
 about love of the fatherland, or of the duties of a citizen, as 
 there is of the study of scientific truth, or of the beautiful 
 in art and poetry. Noble, and pure, and heroic as the lives 
 of many of the Christians of the first two centuries were, it 
 is not pretended that they were Roman patriots, or that 
 they looked on Greek sculpture with any other feeling than 
 unmixed abhorrence. When we reach the age of Dante, 
 the traditions of old Greek and Roman life began to be 
 taken up again, so far as Christian dogma permitted. Yet 
 even Dante was compelled, by his creed, to thrust his noblest 
 fellow citizens into hell, and to lay it down distinctly that, 
 without acceptance of the Christian creed, there could be no 
 salvation. In John Milton, poet and statesman ; in Ben- 
 jamin Franklin, the patriotic, wise republican and audacious- 
 scientific discoverer — the man who wrested the lightning 
 from the sky, and the sceptre from the tyrant — we catch 
 glimpses of a type of manhood that it was not given to St. 
 Paul any more than to Aristotle to know. I am not carping 
 at the greatness of these men ; I speak of their inevitable 
 shortcomings merely to show that, if religion means the 
 concentration of all the powers of life upon the noblest 
 ideal, then the religion of the future will be wider, more 
 complete, than any religion of the past. It will embrace 
 more completely than the Catholic or Mahommedan faiths 
 every side of life — not the life of inward emotion merely, 
 though unselfish love is upheld and glorified as the primal 
 source of good, but the life, also, of thought, and imagina- 
 tion, and poetry ; and, above' all, the life of civic duty. In 
 a word, the Religion of the Future will answer more fully 
 to its definition. It will be more truly a religion. 
 
 A few words, in conclusion, as to the work carried on 
 by Comte's disciples. 
 
 Our principal effort, during the quarter of a century that 
 has passed since Comte's death, has been to bring his teach- 
 ing home to the minds and hearts of those among whom we 
 live, using such original power as belonged to us — and the 
 humblest has some — in building up, stone by stone, some 
 part of the temple of which he left the plan. We have 
 worked — most of us here, at any rate — under the leadership 
 of his intimate friend and disciple, M. Pierre Laffitte, who, 
 for thirteen years, spent one day in every week in intimate 
 personal intercourse with him. His great scientific power^ 
 
i2g 
 
 width of erudition, and sympathetic eloquence, have at last 
 broken through the circle of silence drawn by the specialists 
 of literature and science ; and the upper class in Paris is 
 beginning to recognise, as the workmen have long recognised, 
 the existence of Positivism as an effective moral power 
 with which it will be necessary to count. 
 
 Other centres of Positivist action have arisen in various 
 parts of France and of England, in Holland, in Sweden, in 
 America. Most of these, though not all, are connected 
 with the original centre. On the whole, no doubt is left on 
 the mind of any one who knows the facts, that the Society 
 of Humanity is growing steadily ; and the preparation for 
 it is proceeding still more rapidly ; many who deeply sym- 
 pathise holding still aloof to see, for a while, how we work. 
 Divisions have arisen among us, as will almost always be 
 the case amongst those who strive eagerly in an unselfish, 
 as among those who work in a selfish cause, the differ- 
 ence being that divisions are inherent in the nature of a 
 selfish cause, whereas those of the first tend spontaneously 
 to disappear. They are due, partly to natural infirmities, 
 partly to real difficulties. In aiming to make the conception 
 of Humanity distinct and vivid, some have thought it best 
 to use liturgical forms more or less resembling those of 
 older religions ; others, as most of us here, have thought 
 other ways of expression more simple and more real, and 
 more adapted to our time. But these differences are quite 
 transient. The future will take other ways, better than 
 either. In reality, the ways of presenting this great central 
 truth are countless. The humblest lesson in science may 
 be filled with it ; for all scientific teaching, from arithmetic 
 . upwards, should be penetrated with the historical spirit. 
 By showing how the science grew, the driest details should 
 glow with human interest. The great scientific discoveries 
 are great social events. Every word in every language is 
 a record of human striving and human fellowship ; so with 
 poetry, painting, sculpture; so with each step in the indus- 
 trial arts — weaving, agriculture, ;building, metal- working ; 
 so, finally, with the great art of human life itself, the art of 
 faithfully doing our duty. The trained impulse to do good, 
 the right ways of doing it, alike come to us from the silent 
 wisdom, heroism, and self-sacrifice of the past. So that all 
 these ways of teaching fall into two : quietly and clearly to 
 explain the Past from which we come ; to kindle glowing 
 aspirations for the Future towards which we tend ; and so 
 from both elements of Time to frame the temper of mind and 
 heart that shall best enable us to do our duty in the Present. 
 We do not say the Past, the Present, and the Future : 
 we say, rather, the Past, the Future, the Present. There 
 
 K 
 
I30 
 
 are those who think that we have neglected the second 
 element too much ; that we have been too scientific and 
 prosaic, and not enthusiastic enough ; that we have thought 
 too' much about the Past, not enough about the Future; too 
 much about Science, too little about Poetry. Perhaps it is 
 so ; we are not at all wedded to one way of going on ; but as 
 yet it is true that we have been more anxious to dig founda- 
 tions than to carve capitals and to paint roofs. But we are 
 always ready to revise our ways and to modify them as time 
 goes on. However this may be, from the Past and from the 
 Puture we have to come back to the infinitely little and all- 
 important Present : the life and action of each individual 
 man and woman. 
 
 When any one asks, " What can we do to help on the 
 advent of the Future you speak of ? I am not a philosopher, 
 poet, teacher : I am absorbed in daily work : I can do 
 nothing in the matter." The answer is plain. The main 
 part of the work before us is not to be done by teachers of 
 any kind. It is to be done by men and women of every 
 position and occupation in life, who do their duty righteously 
 and simply, without any other outward reward than the 
 sympathy and love of those around them who are doing the 
 like ; and sometimes, though rarely, without even this. 
 The work of teaching, lecturing, and so on, is no doubt 
 necessary, just as a rudder is necessary in a ship, or a linch- 
 pin in a cart ; 'but the main things are the ship and the cart 
 themselves. The reason of our coming together regularly 
 is, that any kind of organisation, however loose, makes our 
 work more effective. We have heard too much of armies 
 lately. But the fact remains, that ten men, acting together, 
 will do more than a hundred acting separately. The word 
 *' Sacrament," ,which Comte has revived, greatly to the 
 startling of mystics on one side and free-thinkers on the 
 other, was not originally a mystical word at all, but simply 
 the old Roman oath of military allegiance ; nor has it with 
 us the slightest remnant of mysticism. The Sacraments in- 
 stituted by Comte are simply a formal recognition that the 
 principal events of private life — birth, choice of a profession, 
 marriage, death — are matters of public concern ; that the 
 family and the society surrounding it have definite duties 
 to one another. These sacraments, or declarations of alle- 
 giance, have been taken frequently in Paris and in London ; 
 they will become more common as time goes on. 
 
 In any case, the most essential contribution that any man 
 or woman amongst us can bring to our common work, is the 
 doing of his or her own duty bravely and unselfishly. No 
 other kind of help can be put for a moment in comparison 
 with this. Banker, builder, boot-maker, each must see that 
 
131 
 
 his own work is genuine, and free from the dry-rot which 
 infects modern industrial life. 
 
 Then we have our duties as citizens. Having done our 
 day's work, we have to do what we can to form and change 
 for the better that public opinion by which the action of 
 statesmen is always in the end guided. We should be ready, 
 and I think most of us are ready, to join, as far as time 
 serves, all movements that aim at public justice. Sometimes 
 we begin such movements, and invite others to join them. 
 We do what we can, whether much or little, to prevent 
 unjust wars, to secure justice for Oriental nations, for un- 
 civilised tribes. We try to help on all such reforms as build 
 more than they destroy, and to discourage all that destroy 
 noble and precious traditions for the sake of relieving 
 some temporary inconvenience. Our political and social 
 principles are neither aristocrat nor democrat : they are 
 sociocrat ; in other words, republican. 
 
 The great practical problem before our generation, before 
 which all others pale into insignificance, is to effect such a 
 distribution of wealth that every worker shall have leisure 
 enough and wages enough to lead a civilised life. In other 
 words, that in addition to sufficient food, clothing, and house- 
 room, there shall be time and means for the life of the spirit ; 
 the life of the citizen ; the life of a man who wishes to know 
 something of the best things that have been done in the 
 world. 
 
 Now, we cannot bring about the redistribution of wealth 
 which is to do all these things. We disbelieve in the possi- 
 bility of doing it suddenly, by any violent or mechanical 
 means. . Legislation may palliate the evil, and so far as it 
 can palliate it we support and forward legislation; but the 
 first condition of all real reform consists, as we are deeply 
 convinced, in a moral change in the whole way of looking at 
 wealth, as the creation of society, in no sense created by the 
 man who happens to hold it ; therefore, morally, a debt to be 
 repaid by Social uses. At this moral change in the way of 
 looking at wealth the Religion of Humanity directly points. 
 And, meantime, we do our best to rectify the worst of 
 inequalities, that of education. It is simply for want of men 
 and of time, not for want of will, that we do not at once 
 realise in this room the full schSme of Positive Education, 
 which places the great conceptions of art and poetr)', and the 
 leading truths of science, before every one of either sex, rich 
 or' poor ; and, meantime, though we cannot as yet do so much 
 as this, we place at the disposal of those who care to receive 
 it such culture as we 'possess, whether in science, in history, 
 in language, in art of every kind, musical or pictorial. The 
 two ladies who have taught French and music in this room, 
 
 K2 
 
132 
 
 during the summer, have set an example which I hope they 
 may be able to continue, and others to follow. 
 
 Let me not be thought to speak in any spirit of boasting 
 of our very humble performances. We believe our aim to be 
 so high that none can surpass it ; and, therefore, we believe 
 that the future belongs to us. In striving towards that future 
 we offer a rallying point for those whom the theological creeds 
 cannot satisfy. But we know well that thousands and tens 
 of thousands of men and women all over England, of every 
 creed and of no creed, are striving to make their fellow men 
 better and happier as well as they know how. Let us begin 
 by doing as well as they ; our better teaching, and, as we 
 think, our higher aim, will lead us in the end to do still 
 better. The great and noble-hearted man whom I have 
 called the founder of the Christian Church, fell into the 
 grievous error, inevitable perhaps in his time and place, of 
 thinking that unless we believed in the Resurrection we 
 might as well say, " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
 die ". The yet greater man, whom we commemorate to-day, 
 has taught and acted otherwise. Of what went before, or , 
 shall follow after, we know nothing ; our little life, as Shake- 
 speare says, is rounded in a sleep. But Comte's life and 
 doctrine teach with new clearness the old lesson that the only 
 blessed life is one of righteousness and self-sacrifice ; and the 
 object of banding ourselves together is to help one another 
 and those around us to lead that life. 
 
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