--_The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no
worse, if imagination amend them._ Hippolyta.--_It must be your
imagination then, not theirs._'--Midsummer's Night's Dream, Act V.

'_Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts._'--Prologue to Henry
V.

[24] Seneca says of virtue, '_Non quia delectat placet, sed quia placet
delectat_.' Of vice in the same way we may say, '_Non quia delectat_
pudet, _sed quia_ pudet _delectat_.'

[25] It will be of course recollected that in this abstraction of the
moral sense, we have to abstract it from the characters as well as
ourselves.

[26] '_When I attempt to give the power which I see manifested in the
universe an objective form, personal or otherwise, it slips away from
me, declining all intellectual manipulation. I dare not, save
poetically, use the pronoun_ "He" _regarding it. I dare not call it a_
"Mind." _I refuse even to call it a_ "Cause." _Its mystery overshadows
me; but it remains a mystery, while the objective frames which my
neighbours try to make it fit, simply distort and desecrate it._'--Dr.
Tyndall, '_Materialism and its Opponents_.'

CHAPTER VII.

THE SUPERSTITION OF POSITIVISM.

Glendower. _I can call spirits from the vasty deep._

Hotspur. _Why so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?_
Henry IV. Part 1.

General and indefinite as the foregoing considerations have been, they
are quite definite enough to be of the utmost practical import. They are
definite enough to show the utter hollowness of that vague faith in
progress, and the glorious prospects that lie before humanity, on which
the positive school at present so much rely, and about which so much is
said. To a certain extent, indeed, a faith in progress is perfectly
rational and well grounded. There are many imperfections in life, which
the course of events tends manifestly to lessen if not to do away with,
and so far as these are concerned, improvements may go on indefinitely.
But the things that this progress touches are, as has been said before,
not happiness, but the negative conditions of it. A belief in this kind
of progress is not peculiar to positivism. It is common to all educated
men, no matter what their creed may be. What is peculiar to positivism
is the strange corollary to this belief, that man's subjective powers of
happiness will go on expanding likewise. It is the belief not o