Hi'' 1 folds a leaff aomnfy'ltiiultoattebromnr hoinaEfs marl or bfottr >hul nnftth f A 0,1^ From the Library of the late G. W. Foote. ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES BY THE LATE JOHN HENRY BRIDGES, M.B., F.R.C.P. SOMETIME FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD LATK MEDICAL METROPOLITAN INSPECTOR TO THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC HARRISON LONDON CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD. 1907 EDITOR'S NOTE OF the papers here collected some have already been printed in one form or another. " Prayer and Work," " Religion and Progress," " Man the Creature of Humanity," and " Calderon," were included in the Discourses on Positive Religion (2nd ed., 1891). We have to thank Messrs. Macmillan for permission to include " Harvey and His Successors," which was delivered as the Harveian Oration before the Royal College of Physicians ; and the Council of the Sociological Society for permission to reprint " Some Guiding Principles of the Philosophy of History," from Sociological Papers, vol. ii. The remain- ing papers were written out for use in lecturing, and were not revised by the author for publication. They are printed here precisely as they stand, with no alterations, except of a very few slips of the pen. Some of them are portions only of lectures, the remainder existing only in the form of rough notes. But in all cases they appear sufficiently complete in themselves to be printed as they stand. L. T. HOBHOUSE. 1907. INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC HARRISON ALTHOUGH the life of Dr. Bridges was absorbed in active work, first as a Physician to a hospital, then as Inspector under the Government, as a zealous apostle of sanitation, and finally as systematic teacher and preacher, he found time to produce a large amount of literary achievements. The extent and variety of this is only known to his friends and colleagues ; but it is really extraordinary for one who was a practical worker and would entirely disclaim the character of being a mere student or a man of letters. The present volume contains a selection of some of his occasional pieces of permanent value and solid learning. His more important works were these: (i) The trans- lation, and editing with analyses, of the first volume of Comte's Politique Positive in its English form (1875), a bulky octavo of 678 pages. This contains the General View, Cosmology, Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chem- istry, and Biology and could not have been accomplished by any one without a general training in the sciences as well as philosophy. (2) He devoted many years of his life to editing the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, 3 vols. 8vo. (1897-1900). (3) His RicJielieu and Colbert (1866) obtained the enthusiastic praise of J. Cotter Morison, and was worthy of such commendation. (4) The Unity of Comte's Life and Doctrine, addressed to J. Stuart Mill viii INTRODUCTION (1866), was a complete refutation of the criticism made by Mill in his volume on Positivism. (5) To the New Calendar of Great Men (1892) Dr. Bridges contributed 194 Biographies of philosophers, men of science, and poets. To various publications he contributed the following studies: to the Oxford Essays, 1857, The yews in Europe in the Middle Ages; to International Policy, 1866, the essay on- China ; to the Fortnightly Review, between 1869 and 1 88 1, seven different articles ; to the Revue Occidental (in French) thirteen articles ; to the Sociological Society, three papers (1905-6). For the Positivist Review, between 1893 and 1907, he wrote no less than one hundred papers, and to the Positivist Society he gave an immense series of addresses from 1879 to 1906. A literary product so large, extending over exactly fifty years, from 1857 to 1907, including posthumous papers, and ranging in subject from the Jews in the Middle Ages to the Taxation of Suburban Land, from Calderon to Herbert Spencer, from Moses to Charles Darwin, was in no way either miscellaneous or discontinuous, neither superficial nor literary. It was all infused into organic unity by that potent instrument of Synthesis the co-ordination of human life and thought in all its phases by devotion to the deve- lopment of Humanity under the inspiration of a scientific philosophy of Nature and Man. To this dominant ideal John Bridges over fifty years, 1856-1906, consecrated every hour of his life and every energy of his mind. Of all the colleagues with whom he worked and taught during this period, he was far the first to master the encyclopaedic system of Auguste Comte, as he was the one who had most truly and thoroughly absorbed it in conception and in practice. Under a really scientific synthesis, thus absorbed by a fully competent mind, over INTRODUCTION ix a long course of years of study and experience, things apparently disparate fall into their proper correlation, and ideas of abstract science join forces with poetic imagination and the conduct of practical life. Bridges was fond of dilating on the infinitely subtle meanings of the verse in which Comte expressed his co-ordination of the three human forces Thought, Feeling, Activity : " Agir par affection et penser pour agir." (Affection prompts the act which thought must guide.) The general works of John Bridges and the story of his indefatigable life must be left for the future. The present volume aims only at collecting some typical ex- amples of his philosophical and literary labours. The five essays in Part I. give an adequate sketch of the Positivist scheme as a working propaganda. The general Synthesis, or animating idea, runs through all of them. But they illustrate various parts of the doctrine in practical application to life. Their special subjects are : Worship or Prayer Faith in a Positive Creed Love as the moving force in human Nature The evolution and influence of the Past The meaning and power over man of Humanity as the collective spirit of the Past, the Present, and the Future. The first address, entitled "Prayer and Work," has peculiar interests for all associated with the Positivist movement. It was delivered on the Day of Humanity, January I, 1879, and was the first of the series of annual addresses which have now been publicly given on New Year's Day by the same body without a break for twenty- eight years. It gave the key-note of these addresses, and was delivered when Dr. Bridges was the first President of the English Positivist Committee formed by M. Pierre Laffitte in 1878. It became the type which has been x INTRODUCTION mainly followed ever since. It opens with an Exhortation to bear in memory the great phases of civilization and the heroes and martyrs of its long evolution. Such an Exhor- tation takes the place of Invocations to supernatural Powers and Supplications to obtain personal blessings. Thence the preacher passes to Prayer. " To pray is to form the ideal of our life, by entering into communion with the Highest." But this communion cannot be attained by dwelling in thought on an invisible ideal, unless it be trained and supported by habitual union with beings nearer and dearer to us in daily life. Nor can it end in mere feeling without sinking into mysticism or into routine. Prayer and Work Desire united with Effort is the essence of all true religion. Positivism is " Catholicism become scientific.' Religion does not consist in the repetition of formulas and of rites. Religion is the devotion of heart, mind, and will to the service of humanity. Goodness, justice, truthfulness, and purity do not rest on any mysterious revelation, but on laws of nature which all men may be taught to recognize and to submit to in their lives. The second essay, " Religion and Progress," was also given in 1879 as an address when Bridges was President of the new Positivist Committee. It was devoted to explain the apparent paradox but profound truth of a favourite maxim of Comte's Man becomes more and more religious. Starting with a sympathetic extract from Cardinal Newman, Bridges insists on the indispensable necessity for a solid doctrine as the basis of all religion an idea which Neo- Christianity in all its phases is now quite ready to throw aside. Then he shows that, with the incessant march of modern science and scientific thought, there can be no hope of stability in any'doctrine which has not science in all its aspects for its foundation. There can be no peace or INTRODUCTION xi confidence in any religion which is liable to be continually displaced by demonstrable certainties. From this basis, Bridges unfolds Comte's scheme of a religion of Humanity, entirely based as its creed on cer- tainties, and aiming in all its purposes and institutions at human improvement and the development of human well- being on earth, as destined to give an immense enlargement to religion. Far from destroying or sterilizing religion, as was vainly imputed to him, Comte would open to religion worlds of feeling, thought, and activity undreamt of yet by any Saint or Pontiff, even if it had been dimly foreshadowed by the hysterical mysticism of some saintly hermit in his cell. The cramping and withering of religion in our age is due to the obsolete perversity of theologians who continue to restrain the meaning and aim of religion to supermun- dane visions, which are utterly remote from the actual world of modern men, and have no relation to what reasonable men think and know, or to what good men and women love and desire. The third essay, " Man the Creature of Humanity," was an address given at Newton Hall in the first year of its tenure by the Positivist Society (1881); and it is a resumt of the Positivist conception of Humanity as a source and centre of Religion. It opens with the first paragraph of Comte's Synthtse Subjective, which Bridges truly says contains "the whole essence of Comte's teaching." It may be worth while to repeat the first sentence of four lines but thirty words in French a striking example of Comte's closely knit and profound aphorisms. "The subordination of Progress to Order, of Analysis to Synthesis, of Self-love to Love of Others ; these are the three modes, practical, theoretical, and ethical, of describing the problem of man's life, the attainment of complete and lasting unity." As xii INTRODUCTION Bridges says, rightly to understand this intricate sentence " would ask the study of a lifetime." But nothing can be more effective than Bridges' exposition of the relation of mathematics to morals, of the relation of broad or narrow views of science to social affection or to self-love. Yet the whole aim of Positivism is to show the concatenation of abstract thought to moral conduct, the sequence of philosophic breadth to practical altruism. The key of the mystery is found in Humanity, wherein all modes of thought, of feeling, and of life, find at once their inspiration and their purpose. The whole of this essay is a typical example of the singular power of the conception of Humanity as under- stood by Positivism, to correlate the most dissimilar ideas and to illustrate the most diverse facts. Wordsworth's Excursion, Watts' steam-engine, Goethe's poems, Burns' Daisy, the Irish Incumbered Estates Act, mediaeval and Oriental monasticism, Paul's Epistle to the Romans, Dante's Paradise, Communism, the Decalogue of Moses, the Virgin Mother, the Iliad, the basis of ethics, the mariner's sextant, the battle of Salamis, Wagner's operas, and Calderon's Autos Sacramentales all in turn join in expounding the infinite sources of Humanity the Power of whom only we can say, nihil a se alienum. The address on " Love the Principle" (October, 1888) is perhaps of all pieces in this volume the one which will cause the greatest surprise to those who know nothing of Positivism, and yet is the piece which is the most redolent of Bridges' spiritual attitude. There are whole passages in it which Cardinal Newman might have penned, and which do not fall below his high-water mark of veneration for early Catholicism and his fervour to arouse devoutness of heart. Yet withal no Agnostic could more unsparingly denounce INTRODUCTION xiii the radical failure of Catholicism to accomplish its mission and the degradation of the Christian Church when it sank "to the bedimmed folly" of declaring in the Church Article that all works done before the grace of Christ are evil and of the nature of sin. Nor could any Darwinian insist more earnestly on the universal law of evolution. It is the union of devotional zeal with scientific reality that makes the force and the fascination of the Positivist Synthesis. And it is especially in such a part as this that Bridges' best work was done. This treatise on " Love " depends on a different under- standing of the term than that we find in Plato's Phadrus, or in St. Bernard's De Amore Dei and yet it combines something of both. In unfolding all the connotations of the central maxim of the religion of Humanity Love as the Principle Bridges traces in turn all the sides of this ancient, world-wide, human conception from the lowest to the highest, showing it to be real, that is, innate in human nature ; useful, as was said, omnia vincit amor, for friend- ship, loyalty, patriotism, are but some of its forms ; certain, precise, definite, as every scientific demonstration is bound to be. Finally, Love is obviously and necessarily relative, organic, sympathetic. Now, these seven connotations are all involved in the dominant term, Positive. The paper on the " Philosophy of History," read before the Sociological Society in 1905, is a study of the place of History in the science of Sociology, and the conditions and limits of scientific history. It in no way undervalues the necessity for specialist research ; but it insists on the need for a dominant conception of general history to give coherence and sequence to the special history of periods, nations, and institutions. And this involves not merely a scheme of general history as a record of facts, but a xiv INTRODUCTION scientific outline of the evolution of human society. The paper shows how largely this conception of human evolution has been developed by modern research in the Oriental nations and in the lowest fetichist races since the time of Comte : yet, withal, how recent studies in the last fifty years have given life and meaning to Comte's profound generalizations. The rest of this paper is mainly devoted to expounding the law of human progress as the passage from the primitive Theocracy we now find dominant in Asia long ages before Moses through a series of stages down to the Sociocracy, or the ordering of society in the light of scientific canons of social morality, which we may distinctly note for the last hundred years as being in advancing ascendency in Europe. The essence of the argument lies in the ingenious and novel attempt to trace a law of progress in the absorption into the Roman Empire of the discordant activities of the scattered Hellenic republics, in the dissolution of Roman imperialism into a new Feudal and Catholic West. Hellenists, Professors of Roman law, and enthusiasts of Romantic or Christian mediaevalism, are not to be easily convinced that an intelligible stream of progress can be shown in the long, broken, stormy course of evolution from Solon and Thales to the nineteenth century of Cavour and Darwin. But a true philosophy of History can trace a real and consistent sequence. In passing to the second part of this volume estimates of the great thinkers and poets we leave the more formal exposition of Positive doctrine for the life-work of foremost men and general surveys of the philosophy and the litera- ture of their epochs ancient, mediaeval, and modern. Each of the five essays bears the name of some illustrious writer in science, poetry, and letters ; but it is a striking feature in INTRODUCTION xv Bridges' biographies of men, that they appear as types and representatives of those movements out of which they arose and which they largely developed. These are not detached biographies of famous individuals : they are aperpts of the great ages of new light and the progress of ideas. It is the distinctive note of Bridges' mind, as it is of the Positive Philosophy, to look on intellectual progress in its entirety, and to see it in the interaction of all its sides and its reaction on all parts of human life. This is " seeing life whole," as we are told to do. Accordingly, these six names range from the views of Greek geometers in the sixth century B.C., to Diderot at the close of the eighteenth century A.D. from geometry and eclipses of the sun to the French theatre and the Encyclopaedia of D'Alembert and his friends. The chosen types open with Thales to remind us of Comte's incessant appeals to base all syste- matic thought on mathematics. As Plato said, " Let no man enter if ignorant of geometry." This cardinal truth of Positivism is one which Bridges is especially keen to inculcate. The essay on Roger Bacon an address given at Oxford in 1903 sums up the essential results of Bridges' long study of the great Franciscan thinker to whom he devoted some of the best years of his life, even going to Rome to consult the manuscript in the Vatican. It is, indeed, much more than an essay on Bacon. It is an illuminating study of the whole course of mediaeval thought, especially interesting by the light it throws on the incalculable impor- tance to European and Christian thought of the Arabian and Mussulman learning without which it is hard to see how the filiation of Greek science could have been re- covered in the Middle Ages amid the destructive fanaticism of Catholic theology. But for the Arabs of Baghdad and xvi INTRODUCTION Cordova, Aristotle might have suffered the fate of Sapho. As we read the story of Bacon's marvellous genius and prophetic intuitions of the science to come, we see him as a man in advance of his age by five we may almost say six centuries. And one wonders if we are right in putting Francis on a pedestal higher than that occupied by Roger. But the Chancellor had great predecessors and great con- temporaries the Monk had none akin to his own mind. What was utterly premature to Roger, was fully ripe to Francis Bacon. When the Harveian oration was offered to Bridges by Sir Andrew Clark, the President of the Royal College of Physicians, it was a happy inspiration which reflected honour both on Bridges and the learned Society which chose him for the task. As one of those who was present, I can bear witness to the success of the lecture and the emphatic welcome it received from those who heard it. The fragment on Dante, brief as it is, does full justice to one who, in a special sense, must always be the poet of the religion of Humanity. No adept of the Dantesque school could feel that any side of his teaching has been here underrated. And all students of Dante will be interested in Bridges' mode of dealing with the vexed problem. Was Dante a sincere Catholic or a conscious sceptic and reformer ? The answer given is, that Dante was long absorbed in free criticism of the Church, but at the close of his life he felt himself to be in sincere communion with the Catholic institutions, if not in humble acceptance of the Catholic Creed. But Bridges goes on to show that what a man thinks he believes is not always the same thing as the real effect of his thoughts. And in this sense, although Dante is truly "the voice of ten silent centuries," and idealizes the inmost spirit of Catholicism from INTRODUCTION xvii Augustine downwards, he belongs in imagination quite as truly to the six centuries of modern progress and free thought. Nay, indeed, Dante has only just begun to be understood in all his spiritual depths, and the religion of Humanity alone can supply the key to unlock the subtle convolutions of mystic meaning wherein the secret of the Paradiso has been so long enshrined. The essay on Calderon is a model of deep and inform- ing judgment on one of the great poets of the world such as we rarely get even from the most subtle of literary critics. It is not merely a study of the Shakespeare of Spain, but it is a revelation of the spirit of Spain itself, the only possible apology of the Spanish Church, a lesson to Protestant England of the nineteenth century on the religious meaning of the mediaeval drama. Cultivated men and women to-day are willing to admit the genius of Calderon : but how few of them know him otherwise than in the isolated fragment of Shelley, the ingenious fantasias of FitzGerald, and it may be a play or two from McCarthy ! John Bridges read Calderon for himself in the original. In his long life of eighty years Calderon wrote more than two hundred dramas, besides minor interludes. For the last thirty years of his life he devoted himself almost entirely to his Sacramental Acts Miracle Plays in honour of the Sacrament. I know no one who has traced the origin, aim, and devotional reaction of these Autos Sacramentales so well as we find it in the pages of his essay. " The occasion, the subject, the place, the audience, the style, the mode of construction, were all different from those of other dramas." It is a form of art most alien to everything we conceive of the stage ; one particularly hard for the England of to-day to understand. Bridges put it to us in clear form, because xviii INTRODUCTION he unveils to us, with historical and sociological insight, the innate character of the mixed Iberian nature, and the indomitable traditions of which the Spanish religion and drama were the popular expression. In doing this, he gives an admirable analysis of the spiritual contrasts between mediaeval Catholicism and modern Protestantism. From first to last, the Spanish drama during the hundred years of its great age (1580-1680) was entirely a religious institution, had religious ideals as its inspiration, and was composed by men who, like Calderon, ultimately entered priestly orders. " His work was the portraiture of the manners and the passions of a Catholic and Feudal people." The conjunction in a single lecture of Corneille with Diderot of the severe, heroic, Catholic poet of the mon- archy with the audacious, bohemian, anti-Christian philo- sopher of the revolution is a tour de force, highly characteristic of Bridges' mind, a paradox only to be solved by Positivist ideas. Corneille and Diderot in the Positivist Calendar hold corresponding places under Shake- speare and Descartes respectively, each representing an influence on the evolution of Humanity the one of noble Art, the other of clear Thought. For all his Catholic creed, Corneille idealizes human (not clerical) morality. And Diderot, for all his restless diversity of genius, is the most synthetic of all the revolutionary spirits. Bridges' analysis of the grand ethical motives of Corneille may read many a lesson to our age, which can endure on the stage nothing but Elizabethan fantasias and psychologic pro- blems. I know no critic who has unfolded the moral and spiritual meaning of Corneille's Polyeucte as we find it explained in this essay. We are all so familiar with the marvellous activities of Voltaire, whose name just now is receiving a new apotheosis, INTRODUCTION xix that it may surprise some readers to find Diderot assigned as the really creative mind of the eighteenth century. If Voltaire did the principal work of analysis and destruction, it was Diderot who laid the germ of the constructive New Age of which we see as yet little more than the ground plan. The fact is that, scattered through the diversified products of Diderot's encyclopaedic mind, we find one after another the germs of the positive conceptions of Nature and of Man, which Auguste Comte cast into a system. More than any of the thinkers of the eighteenth century, Diderot had conceptions of philosophy from the relative, not the absolute point of view, of an anthropocentric world displacing an immeasurable and incomprehensible universe. The Encyclopaedia, with all its faults and its weaknesses, was an adumbration of the concentration of thought, science, and zeal on the practical realization of human well-being on earth. CONTENTS PACE EDITOR'S NOTE v INTRODUCTION BY FREDERIC HARRISON vii PART I ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE I. PRAYER AND WORK 3 II. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 34 III. MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY .... 65 IV. LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 96 V. SOME GUIDING PRINCIPLES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 114 PART II COMMEMORATIVE ADDRESSES a. HEROES OF THOUGHT THALES 143 ROGER BACON i$g HARVEY AND His SUCCESSORS ^9 b. HEROES OF LITERATURE- DANTE 220 CALDERON 235 CORNEILLE AND DlDEROT 264 THE DAY OF ALL THE DEAD 292 xxi PART I ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE PRAYER AND WORK* I WE meet here to-day to celebrate the festival of Humanity. By thought and by feeling we seek to enter into the pre- sence 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 resistless power of this unseen host we bow in thankful submission ; knowing well that of ourselves we are insufficient, either to see or to do what is right. What- ever 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 * This address was delivered January ist, 1879. 3 B 2 4 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 truthful 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, burst- ing through the oppressive bonds of theocratic dominion, sought to idealize and to enlighten human life, by art founded on reality, and by discovery of the laws of nature ; and chief among these we speak of Homer and of jEschylus, of Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Archi- medes. We commemorate the Roman State, eternal type of heroic endurance sustained through centuries, using the arts of conquest and of government for the establishment of a peaceful 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, Caesar, 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, PRAYER AND WORK 5 Alfred, or Godfrey, who, uniting Roman energy with Christian faith, created in chivalry the new ideal of man- hood, 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 human energies free for higher aims. We celebrate the poets, painters, and musicians of modern Europe, Dante, Raphael, Shakespeare, and Mozart, who, amidst the in- evitable 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 government was the surest defence of free thought against corrupt and retrograde 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, 6 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE unknown to themselves, they worked together towards a common purpose ; and who, by establishing 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 conviction 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 con- tinued 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 progress, 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 attainment 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 PRAYER AND WORK ? 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 unflinch- ingly 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 Mahom- med to his own followers ; it was used ungrudgingly of his Judaic and Christian predecessors. There is no fitter word for the religion of the human race. If there is any one word in Western language which can translate it fully, it is the word religion itself ; and that word needs inter- pretation for ears untrained in Latin speech. The word Islam unfolds itself for us, as for the followers of Mahom- med, into the two great and inseparable aspects of life : prayer and work. Pray and give alms, said Mahommed ; almsgiving in his wide interpretation 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 mediaeval 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 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE Chinese society together for five-and-twenty centuries : I find it in the ancient theocracy of Hindostan ; I find it in the monuments of Egypt as their secrets are gradually revealing themselves 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 discipline 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 devotion of our life to the highest, the bringing of our own will into accordance with r 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, if they 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 upholders 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 PRAYER AND WORK 9 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 forms of words, should be able to effect a change in the laws of the distribution of wealth or in the direction of rain-clouds, is a superstition which, though it lingers in our official prayer-book to the present day, it is hardly neces- sary 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 disappearance. The mockery of sceptics and the deepest feelings of pious people, if they have not been in unison in this respect, 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 con- tinued process of miraculous disturbance from the arbitrary and inconsistent caprices of believers. And at the same time, the conviction, 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 io ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE with fact : with the facts of the world as they touch man, with the facts of man himself. And it is concerned with these facts 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 facts of our poor, feeble, soiled, imperfect nature precisely as they are, making a full confession of the truth as it stands, without concealment or self-decep- tion 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 facts 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 influences 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 object 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 subject. For Humanity being herself subject to the laws of the surrounding world, to the forces which, through a long course of ages, have fitted this PRAYER AND WORK 11 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 representa- tive to us of this supreme order ; and is clothed, in addition, with the intenser interest following from the human strivings, aspirations, and sympathies 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 and 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 12 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE them in practice. The Dominican and the Jesuit delibe- rately 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 pro- pagation 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 result ! 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. Surely 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 organization of massacre in the name of Rousseauist philanthropy, 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 combative 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, PRAYER AND WORK 13 Positivism 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 tender- ness 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 concentra- tion on one object is the most complete and enduring." f 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 * In this word is included the whole circle of private affections ; differing in range, intensity, and direction, according to the infinite variety of circumstance. t Positive Polity, vol. i. p. 189, Eng. Trans. 14 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE from his own personal experience, and rendering his mean- ing 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 con- ditions of our personal 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 character is incomparably the most important work that can be done in human life, it follows inevitably that this fact, 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 manifestations 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 perfections, 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 imperfections 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 shortcoming ; 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 idealize 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 PRAYER AND WORK 15 who contends with difficulties of soil and climate, and by patient, tender care brings the beautiful wild rose into one stiil more lovely in form and fragrance. Such at least seems to me the spirit of that inward meditation 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 unselfish 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 meaning 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 with- out it, we need not deny this, believing as we do in the infinite superiority of noble action to noble thought or resolution of any kind. Yet wise men of all times, who have watched the instability of man's spirit, the changeful- ness of his moods, the uneven, uncertain temper in which he looks at his higher duties, have recognized 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 art subject to mutability, even against thy will ; so as thou art found one while 16 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 instructed in the spirit standeth fast upon these mutable things ; not heeding what he feeleth in himself, or which way the wind of instability bloweth ; 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 directed unceasingly 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 human life which the weakest and humblest have power to modify, the relations of their home. Think of the infinite reactions on public life that would follow were such motive powers set in action ; 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 faction, or acrid personal animosities. The public life of men would again become beautiful as in the noblest days of our forefathers ; only without the misery of inter- national hatreds, with which the nobleness of Roman and mediaeval life was so inseparably connected. * Book iii. ch. 33, PRAYER AND WORK 17 It will have been remarked that I have spoken exclu- sively 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 opportune- ness, on place and circumstance. The difference is marked in Comte's own life with unmistakable 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 * 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. i8 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 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 reality 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 unmistakably 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 PRAYER AND WORK 19 Positivist meeting. I speak, I again repeat, solely for myself in this, without 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. Augustine, but also Homer and yEschylus, and Aristo- phanes, and Shakespeare and Ariosto, and Cervantes, and Moliere, and Mozart; and it may seem at least worth considering, whether the infinite variety and many-sided- ness 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 insufficiently 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 abandon- ment 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. 20 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 outlines, or in internal organs ; and man's mode of spiritual life, result- ing from the ways in which men have lived together, and handed down the growing framework of tradition from one generation to another, is 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 they remain the same. The heart beats on the left side of the chest, and not on the right, nor will all the physicians 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 PRAYER AND WORK 21 fixed 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 other- wise. 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 industrial competition, should be utterly shut out, and where the only toil should be 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 every- where 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 stimulate 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. 22 .ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 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 PRAYER AND WORK 23 ugly, but because men's eyes were dim. They clutched at the facts that satisfied their hunger and thirst, and gave them warm clothing, 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 positive 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 demon- strable science, as opposed to religions resting on the shifting basis of disputed 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 extra- ordinary feature 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 manhood to the last year of his life his fixed object was to put an end to the anarchy of thought and feeling that was dissipating the energies and endangering the civilization of Europe. And he sought to do this by placing the highest spiritual 24 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE truths of man's nature on the firm basis of science. Whether he spoke as in his earlier days of Sociology becoming 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 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 Philosophic 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 conditions 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 realize, 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 PRAYER AND WORK 25 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 founda- tion on which it rests. Positivism is not, as has been said, Catholicism plus Science : it is a Catholicism become 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. Without 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 cere- monies. These things may be religious, or they may be irreligious, according to the spirit that animates them. Religion is the devotion of our heart, mind, and will to the service of humanity: it is the effort for progress, animated by love, and proceeding on the basis of order. To know what this order may be is then of the very essence of Positive religion. It is the one specially new thing that we have to teach men, that goodness and justice, truthfulness and purity of life do not rest on the mysterious revelations of this or that prophet, be he 26 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE Bouddha, Christ, or Mahommed, but on laws of nature, on an order of the world which the followers of all these three can recognize in common. Therefore to make the conception of a scientific law as universal and as familiar as possible is a most vital part of Positive religion. It is this which explains the extraordinary persistence shown by Comte in popularizing 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 live. 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. Larfitte, 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 convic- tion, and the ultimate sphere of man's highest activity ; endeavouring thus to create a school of true Positivist 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, PRAYER AND WORK 27 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 under- take to teach sociology, to implant the source of that human continuity to which our whole social and spiritual life is due, should so far fill up the gap in their own education as to be aware of the indispensable links in that continuous chain formed by Archimedes, Descartes, and Leibnitz. 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 realize 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 ? 28 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 establishment of the Positive faith must be the aim of each of us. There is at present amongst 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 possible 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 teach- ing : 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 prin- ciples 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 PRAYER AND WORK 29 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 familiarizing ourselves for our own use, if not for the teaching of others, with the logical basis of our own system. Secondly, it must be our work to bring forward the applications of Positive principle to the problems of the day, political and social, as they rise before us. The politi- cal 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 Government of France remain what it is, one of moderate and peaceable 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 30 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE the military vices of the Eastern monarchies, which them- selves, as they underwent the process of collapse that inevitably, and perhaps soon, awaits them, would thus be best prepared to imitate the pacific policy of their neighbours. It is, however, with Asiatic policy that English Posi- tivists 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 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 increas- ing 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 PRAYER AND WORK 31 which for the last thirty years has become increasingly critical. False theories of political economy have stimu- lated 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 neutralized 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 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. * 1878-9. 32 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE Here, as in the battle of opinion which is raging round us, our aim will be, alliance 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 relief 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 procrea- tion and nurture of children, lowering of a standard of family life already too miserably low, being, as we con- ceive, 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 Organiza- tion 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 retro- grades, firm in the defence of some ancient bulwark of social life against the assaults of lawless lust, or sordid avarice. Ohm Hast, ohne Rast, unresting, yet not restless, we wait for the time when our own creed shall approve PRAYER AND WORK 33 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* " L'homfne devicnt de plus en plus religieux" AUGUSTE COMTE. ABOUT six weeks ago a remarkable man, whose powers of reasoning and purity of life are recognized by all his countrymen, 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 b.auty 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 theo- logical 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 * This Address was the last of a series delivered in the Co-operatire Hall, Castle Street, in May and June, 1879. 34 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 35 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 Christianity 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 ; now philosophers and politicians 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, con- sisted "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 36 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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, what- ever 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 Catholic, 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 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. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 37 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 recognize. 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, straight- forward 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 increas- ing 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 38 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 mis- guided and often mischievous philanthropy, and the stronger, seeing through the fallacies of this, sink into silence 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 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 after- wards, 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 aspira- tions 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 39 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 depart- ment 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, immovable conviction which we have with regard to the world around us, so soon as scientific men have found out the natural progress, 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 40 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 great 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 explanations. 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 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 41 mysterious abstraction 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 human 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 theological answer. Then came the time when everything had to 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 institutions, 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 of 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 42 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 govern- ment of belief without 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, certainly not one in a hundred thousand, can go through the proof of this belief. They take it on trust from mathematicians and RELIGION AND PROGRESS 43 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 sympathize fully and deeply with the religions of the past ; to recognize 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 con- cerns 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. 44 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE And mark, first, that these painful thoughts do not occur now for the first time. They come with every great religious 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 revolutionary 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 manuscripts and breaking Greek statues. Every one who loves 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 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 45 reality the water everywhere is travelling towards the sea, so it is with the history of human faith. The founders of the great religions of the world put forward doctrines which seemed utterly incompatible with each other. The Sky-worship of Confucius, the divine multitudes of Hindoo and Greek religions, the monotheisms of Moses, of St. Paul, and of Mahommed, 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 meditations of Christian men and women in the dark ages were not wasted, because their forms of thought, their modes of conceiving 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 realize, 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 Development was to show that the anarchy of Western Europe, then as now, was due to the incomplete- ness of the process of development in different parts of the population ; so that, to use his own technical language, the three methods of philosophizing theological, meta- physical, and positive were all being employed at the same time. Now the very fact of analyzing 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, 46 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE tolerant, forbearing 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 be 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 relating 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 any one be tempted to put it forward. But the fact is that Comte took pleasure in pointing out what important contributions to social philosophy had been made by theological thinkers, and not merely by St. Augustine, 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 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 47 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, pretend 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 fundamental traditions of morality without which society would fall to pieces. For this we owe you our cordial and unfeigned thanks. But is it not beginning to occur to you that the institutions which your doctrines defend are seriously endangered by the decay of the defences ? that in its defence of marriage, for instance, theology is in reality exposing 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 bulwark than yours I In order to make it perfectly clear what he meant by applying the scientific spirit to the study of society and of man, Comte devoted many years to a detailed arrange- ment 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 com- petent, even by those who did not accept all his con- clusions, to do such a work as this, is shown by the fact 48 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 Philosophy, 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 civilization, 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 facts 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 more perfect state has grown from their labours. To look upon ourselves as * 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 devient particulierement indispensable envers le mouvement moderne, &c. Nor did he ever cease to speak of this work as his ouvrage fondamental. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 49 independent of them would be as insane as for the blossom to assert its independence of root and branch. All genera- tions 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 principal subject of my lecture 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 direction 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 philo- sophy 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 generations 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 conflict 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 ; in spoiling the happi- ness, 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 E 50 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 irre- ligious 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 affection of England, we mean all the hard and honest work material, in- tellectual, 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 harvest, in the mine, and at the loom ; strenuous defence against unprovoked attacks, wise labours of statesmen to make just laws ; the brainwork 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 respect of men. And so with Humanity. It is the triumph of good over evil that is the object of our reverence ; and, to a conscience not wholly seared, the strongest impulse to repentance for a life of selfishness will be the thought that, so far as in one man may lie, he has hitherto not forwarded but has delayed that triumph. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 51 I have said enough to show that the Religion of Humanity is something very different from philanthropy, and very different 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 benevo- lence 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 sacra- ment, 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 command- ment of the Decalogue 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 fleet- ing 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 thousands of years of struggling 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 52 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE stored-up labour of successive generations ; just as our science is not created by Isaac Newton, or by any other Englishman or Frenchman, but by Greeks and Arabs and thinkers of many nations handing down the increasing store from century to century ; so it is 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 possessions that we have. A young man once said to our philosopher 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 obedience 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 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 53 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 in- creasing 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 cannot 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 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, and 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 instinctive choice of what is noble and pure, the instinctive repulsion 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 54 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 atmosphere in which the noblest things become more clearly visible to us ; they make the sense of the soul keen ; they remove the blind- ness 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 attempt- ing 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, what is your test of right and wrong doing ? Why keep faith with your neighbour, and dis- appoint 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 frame- work of miraculous legend? Does it cease to taint the very source of righteous and unselfish action by the so- called sanctions of eternal happiness, or eternal torture ? Does it supply a principle which can keep the ancient laws RELIGION AND PROGRESS 55 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 repartition of leisure and comfort, but by making them soldiers in an organized 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 earliest forefathers ? If the Religion of Humanity helps us to subdue the paltry cravings 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. Positivism does not create morality any more than Christi- anity 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 institu- tions 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 56 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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. 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 sympathize with a non-Christian creed. The reckless destruction of the ancient civilizations 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 * Isendula, and what went before and after, were recent when this lecture was given. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 57 countrymen. But these men regarded the Mexican and Peruvian worship as devil-worship ; therefore they could 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 Mohammedanism, 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 civilization 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 news- papers, " 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 interest of the spread of the Gospel, and, therefore, to be sanctified by 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 58 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 civilization and our own belief on populations to whom they are odious, Positivism brings before us the true Gospel of Peace. There can be no sympathy between alien races without clear understanding each of the other ; and Positivism establishes that understanding. The African fetichist represents 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 without 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 recognize in the public life of a nation what is recognized 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 * Daily News, May 7, 1879. RELIGION AND PROGRESS 59 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 pre- cisely 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-worshipping 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 primi- tive 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 difficult 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 revolutionize their laws of marriage, that they shall tolerate amongst them the presence of men whose business it is to pour contempt on all the customs that they have held most sacred, we know that all this results in ruin and degradation, leaving behind it a dis- organized 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 60 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 Progress. 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 greater 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 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 61 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 abso- lute 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 will 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 concentrates 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 perfect ; 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 62 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 preparing 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 conse- crated to the memory of some one among the illustrious men who have helped the common work by moral inspira- tion, by philosophic thought, by wise practical endeavour. One of our first objects, therefore, is to make his calendar extremely familiar to us. If we are asked, Is not Humanity a mere figment? how does Humanity differ 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 RELIGION AND PROGRESS 63 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 primeval 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 : * Paradise, Canto xxxi. 64 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 spring 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 which dare not overwhelm, Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway. Ill MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY* " TJie subordination of Progress to Order, of Analysis to SyntJiesis, of Self-love to Love of OtJiers ; tfiese are tlie three modes, practical, theoretical, and ethical, of describing tfte problem of man's life, the attainment of complete and lasting unity. Here are three ways of stating one and the same question ; answering to tJie three sides of our nature, activity, intelligence, and feeling : but so inter-dependent are these, tJiat the three aspects of the problem are not merely connected, they are identical NevertJieless the last of tJiese takes precedence of tJie two otJiers : since it alone touches the direct source in which the solution is to be found. For Order implies Love ; Synthesis is impossible except as tJie result of Sympathy. Consequently unity in speculation and unity in action are impossible without unity in feeling. Therefore Religion is more important tJian Philosophy or Polity. In the last resort tlierefore it may be said that ttie problem of life is to bring about harmony in our feelings by enlarging social love and repressing self-love. 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 write. It was a treatise on mathematics ; f * Delivered at Newton Hall, Nov. 27, 1881. t Synthhe Subjective, ou systeme universel des conceptions propres a 1' e'tat normal de 1' humanitd. Vol. I. Paris, 1856, 65 F 66 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE the first of a series of four volumes, of which the second was to deal with human nature: the third 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 understand them would ask the study of a lifetime. Yet a little 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 subordination 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 progress, to dispense with specialities and details ? If so, that may be good for angels, but hardly for men ; and even if good, surely impossible and Utopian. I think that the answer to these questions will lead us some way towards under- standing the whole purpose of Auguste Comte's life and work ; the life 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 superseded, and synthesis, order, altruism substituted ; though many superficial MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 67 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 simul- taneously, 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, indis- pensable. 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 precedence 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. They forget that the order of the nineteenth century represents 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, pre- judices which keep a quiet village community together 68 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE are the growth of ages. When for the sake of increasing the week's earnings you 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 I imagine 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 Ark- wright and Watt that many of us would try and see that the work was done rather differently. Wordsworth from his mountains saw the revolution going on, and prophesied its results truly. He saw wholesome village life, a manly, independent peasantry, hardy, vigorous children, disappearing, under canopies of smoke, into hideous encampments of unwholesome 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 popu- lation has thus been stimulated into a disorganized 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, un- checked introduction of 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 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 69 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 subordination of progress to order involves no discouragement to progress. Progress is the very end we propose to ourselves. 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 consideration of a special portion of it. We begin, then, at once 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 sympathize with the whole of it. And now let us pass to the second aspect of the three- fold 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 70 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 mean- ing and purpose to what has gone before. A poet like Gothe, who is a naturalist also, or a naturalist like Hum- boldt, 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 botanize upon his mother's grave," may be a good analyst. But Burns, stopping his plough to pick the daisy, which he has immortalized, was of another mould. Not that the analyzing 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 buy- ing and selling animal. And these supposed arrangements MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 71 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 in- stance 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, institu- tions, hopes, and fears ; and that among these the money- loving instincts play an important, but by no means always a preponderating part Statesman after states- man 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 environment of man's life must be taken into account. The contrast of the Irish Encumbered Estates Act of thirty years ago with the Land Act of 1881 is a signal proof of this. And note that practical wisdom is at one with the deepest philosophy of our time in this tendency to subordinate analysis to synthesis, abstraction to con- crete reality. Not that the abstraction was not good and necessary in its way. The service rendered by Hume, Adam Smith, and other great publicists in analyzing 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 prejudices 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 72 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 mathematical 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 arrangement. 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 studied, 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 in- fluence on the mind, is the dealing with curved lines as an assemblage of infinitely small straight lines, 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 straight lines is a ^branch of science called the differential calculus. And when we have analyzed the curve by means of it, when we have, so to speak, dissected it into its ultimate elements, by means of these abstract MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 73 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 wandering 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 processes is what we do throughout the whole range of science. In the first six sciences, from mathe- matics to sociology, we take partial views of human nature, dissecting it into its various elements, a way which corre- sponds to nothing real, but which is necessary to guide us : in a word, we differentiate. In the mathematical and physical sciences we find the outward conditions of man's life ; his physical environ- ment, 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 rudimentary 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, * Synthhe Subjective^ pp. 506-528. 74 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE abstract, theoretical. There remains, after all 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 relation 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 firm- ness, to keep her husband honest and sober, her children brave and pure. We have seen then these two things. First, the subordination of analysis to synthesis is something widely different from the suppression of analysis. Secondly, what seems the unmeaning paradox of connecting this with the subordination 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, the appeal to which he obtained so hostile a response. Those he addressed made the mistake, wilfully or unconsciously, which I spoke of before. They confounded the subordination of analysis to MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 75 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 subordi- nation 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 alto- gether. Philosophy and Politics have nothing to do with the real problem of man's heart, it may be thought. Let us leave all else, we are tempted to say, and turn to this. 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, Buddhists, 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, have taken a different course. They have not withdrawn themselves from men ; they have striven to act upon them. But they have done so by chaining 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 narcotize their 76 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 Reli- gion 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 temptations have assailed them. Their sympathy must rest on a Synthesis ; their Love must have the aid of Faith. Nevertheless, of the three aspects of the life-problem, the subordination of self-love to social sympathy, though inseparably connected with the other two, is more impor- tant than they. Philosophy, affecting as it does that small minority specially charged with the spiritual destinies of our race, exercises indirectly, through education, 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 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 77 of citizens, would 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 inevit- able failure to own the immense debt due to Rome and Greece, are yet true in their terrible denunciation 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 democratic 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 no * 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. 78 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE wise crushed. The soldier in the intervals of battle provides duly for bodily wants ; the greatest of heroes is not insensitive 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 : 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 wished 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 continu- ance. The brood grow up and are scattered, and forget whose care sheltered them from hunger and cold. 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. * Paradiso, Canto xxiii. MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 79 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 ; * 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 environment 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 pro- gressive 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, * This hypothesis was developed by Comte in the first volume of his Positive Polity; see pages 508-17, Eng. Trans. 8o ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE Family Life, Language, Government. Under the second head, the progress of society, in Asia and elsewhere, from 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. i. Property. 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 con- vention, which they never transgress nor allow dogs belonging to other troops to overpass. 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 distinctly formulated by Comte : (i) Man produces more than he consumes : (2) The pro- duct 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, that capital in its various forms of stored-up food, tools, clothing, houses, etc., gives MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 81 leisure, as it grows, for new forms of activity, such as decorative art or religious ritual, and other modes of spiritual life. Secondly, that 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 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 promiscuous communism, leads in others to ties of singular permanence. But in man alone the con- tinuity 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 develop- ment 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 * Georges Leroy, the friend of Diderot, a contributor to the Ency- clopaedia, and Ranger of the Parks of Versailles and Marly, published his profoundly philosophical Lettres sur les 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. G 82 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE the strongest sanction which they could give. The Deca- logue 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 like- wise, 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 necessary 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. MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 83 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 the preponderance of the Past over the Present is sufficiently obvious. The most marked feature of a civilized 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. i. 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 civilized community : in its most highly developed form still govern- ing the vast empire of China. This form of faith, and the institutions connected with it, are best known under the 84 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 sub- stituted gods for fetiches, invisible agents guiding and moulding nature for the visible objects themselves. Hence grew priesthoods, the interpreters of gods' will to men ; and round the priesthood, that highly organized 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 implanted by caste for various forms of industry, but also what is of infinitely greater moment, hereditary instincts of social discipline. Murder, theft, and adultery had been held in check by the Egyptian priesthood for a long range of centuries before 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 fourteenth to the nineteenth century has been transmuting every aspect of private and public life. * 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. MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 85 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 proceeded, 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 life was organized, as we see in Africa, in China, and in the primitive history of all civilized nations. Under Theocracy we get the wider union of the Caste, joining families who followed the same occupation. Greco-Roman history developed 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 intercourse of modern times has brought man to feel the ties that bind all the inhabitants of this planet together. Such then is the order and progress which form the subject-matter of this science of Sociology. We learn from it to recognize 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 certain family ; we have a particular language ; we are 86 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE taught certain duties ; prejudices, customs, principles are instilled into us ; we are the children of one nation and of one century ; 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. 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 English men, 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 reality for us ; the central point of thought, of activity, of devotion and sympathy. But to have a central meeting-point for thought, action, and sympathy, is to have a religion. Religion has no other meaning than the union of thought, activity, and sympathy in subjection to a power governing our indi- vidual 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- conception lies. It would seem clear on the face of it that MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 87 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 department 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 not 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 understanding 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 ? Or would it be possible so to describe the religion of Humanity with a greater capacity for inexactitude ? 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 life, 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 common welfare. Such actions retard the progress of Humanity, though they cannot arrest it : they disappear, perish, and are forgotten. There are lives wholly made 88 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 philo- sopher, as I have said before, after dragging the long chain of abstruse speculation 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 inces- santly, 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, indi- viduality, circumstance. Homer tells us nothing what- ever of man in the abstract : but of this man and that woman ; of Hector and Achilles ; and Helen, and Pene- lope, and Odysseus. Of the thousand characters of Shake- peare not one is the same. The whole art of Education, which our modern machinery of schools and school boards MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 89 hardly seems to touch, starts from the recognition of these differences. How to establish a principle of unity amidst these infi- nite 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. To go much further into the subject would be impos- sible 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 extreme, 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 admira- tion. But without freedom there can be no true virtue, as wise men have always told us. 90 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 reverence, 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 im- pulse ; 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 stores of force to the higher instincts whose rule they have learnt to recognize, 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 concep- tion ; 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 prac- tise it, and therefore do not need it : but how about the rest ? Where is the sanction for your Positive morality ? I ask in return, what do you mean by sanction ? Do MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 91 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 Indian 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 treasures 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 recognized by all as competent and valid, and where, as in the worst cases might be need- ful, it might be pushed to the extreme limits of moral or even physical isolation. Finally, for natures wholly rebel- lious, there remain 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 92 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE 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 per- manence of the sanction ceases so soon as it should be used unreasonably. Still again the objector argues: granted that free, willing 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 historians, or philosophers, or scientific students ? How touch the hearts of the vast mass of men with any fire of enthusiasm 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 recognize the competent authority of the astronomers of Greenwich, and act accordingly. That is the way great truths get received and permeate 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 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 93 conception 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 sufficiently large public is prepared for them, to give them the spontaneousness without which they would be empty pageants. Take the four festivals marked out for the month dedicated 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 from 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 94 ESSAYS IN POSITIVIST DOCTRINE science ! since for modern no less than for ancient the sun is the fountain 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 inestimable treasure of Greek science, philosophy, and art ; without which Thales, Pythagoras, ^Eschylus, 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 possessions 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 colour and form, with all the resources of artist and skilled artificer no longer wasted on luxurious decora- tions 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 heartfelt 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 MAN THE CREATURE OF HUMANITY 95 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. IV LOVE THE PRINCIPLE* [EDITOR'S NOTE. The first portion of this lecture was not written out in full. The notes show that the lecturer began by taking the term "love" in the widest sense, in which we can speak of " love of money," " love of fame," &c. This brings him to the account of love given by Dante in the seventeenth canto of the Purgatory.] . . . ... IN that canto Dante led by Virgil had passed half- way up the mountain of Purgatory. Of the seven sins or infirmities to which man is prone he had been purged of three Pride, Envy, Anger. There remained the three final stages in which, first, Avarice, then Gluttony (in- cluding, of course, indulgence in drink as well as meat), and, finally, unlicensed sexual desire, were to be uprooted. Pride, Envy, Anger, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust. But between these two groups came one which completes the list of seven ; Luke-warmness ; failure to love ; apathy : and this one leads Dante to place in the mouth of Virgil a long and most profound discourse on the nature of love, a discourse in which the whole meaning and purpose of this division of the poem is explained. "Neither creator, my son, nor creature, lived ever without love; love issuing from natural impulse, or from the spirit, and that thou well knowest. That which is natural is always * A lecture addressed to the Positivist Society, Oct. 14, 1888. 96 LOVE THE PRINCIPLE 97 true and unfailing. But the other kind may err either from a wrong purpose, or from too little strength, or from too much. So long as it is well guided towards higher things, and in lower things is well measured, so long can it never be the cause of evil delight. But when it is warped towards evil, or when it turns towards what is good either with more zeal than is befitting, or with less, then it is that the thing created works against him that created it. From this mayest thou understand that Love must needs be in you the seed of every virtue, and also of every action that deserves punishment. Now, since Love can never turn his face away from the welfare of him who is the subject of it, from hatred of self all beings are free. And since no being can be conceived as separate or standing apart from the Primal Being, therefore from hatred of God all affections are shut off. It remains, if rightly I measure my argument, that evil that is loved is the evil of our fellow-man, and on your miry earth this perverted love grows in three ways. [Note this very important admission made by Dante. The sphere of wrong-feeling and wrong-doing is the social sphere. Self is excluded, God is ex- cluded. To hate self, to hate God, are two things incompre- hensible and inconceivable.] Some there are who hope for excellence by subduing their fellow-man, and for this reason solely thirst to bring him down from his high seat; [/.6(3ov TrepcuVovcra T^V TUV TOIOI/TOJV Tra^/xarajv Ka.6ap