he not only does not know what there is in
common, but that he '_dare_' not even say that, as conscious beings,
they two have anything in common at all.[26] The only things he can know
about the power in question are that it is vast, and that it is uniform;
but a contemplation of these qualities by themselves, must tend rather
to produce in him a sense of separation from it than of union with it.
United with it, in one sense, he of course is; he is a fraction of the
sum of things, and everything, in a certain way, is dependent upon
everything else. But in this union there is nothing special. Its
existence is an obvious fact, common to all men, whether they dwell upon
it or no: and though by a knowledge of Nature we may grow to realise it
more keenly, it is impossible to make the union in the least degree
closer, or to turn it into anything that can be in any way called a
communion. Indeed, for the positivists to talk about communion or
association with Nature is about as rational as to talk about communion
or association with a steam-engine. The starry skies at night are
doubtless an imposing spectacle; but man, on positive principles, can be
no more raised by watching them than a commercial traveller can by
watching a duke--probably far less: for if the duke were well behaved,
the commercial traveller might perhaps learn some manners from him; but
there is nothing in the panorama of the universe that can in any way be
any model for the positivist. There are but two respects in which he can
compare himself to the rest of nature--firstly, as a revealed force;
and, secondly, as a force that works by law. But the forces that are
revealed by the stars, for instance, are vast, and the force revealed in
himself is small; and he, as he considers, is a self-determining agent,
and the stars are not. There are but two points of comparison between
the two; and in these two points they are contrasts, and not
likenesses. It is true, indeed, as I said just now, that a sense of awe
and of hushed solemnity is, as a fact, born in us at the spectacle of
the starry heavens--world upon luminous world shining and quivering
silently; it is true, too, that a spontaneous feeling connects such a
sense somehow with our deepest moral being. But this, on positive
principles, must be feeling only. It means absolutely nothing: it can
have no objective fact that corresponds to it. It is an illusion, a
pathetic fallacy. And to say that the heavens with