nly that
the existing pleasures will become more diffused, but that they will, as
George Eliot says, become '_more intense in diffusion_.' It is this
belief on which the positivists rely to create that enthusiasm, that
impassioned benevolence, which is to be the motive power of their whole
ethical machinery. They have taken away the Christian heaven, and have
thus turned adrift a number of hopes and aspirations that were once
powerful. These hopes and aspirations they acknowledge to be of the
first necessity; they are facts, they say, of human nature, and no
higher progress would be possible without them. What the enlightened
thought is to do is not to extinguish, but to transfer them. They are to
be given a new object more satisfactory than the old one; not our own
private glory in another world, but the common glory of our whole race
in this.

Now let us consider for a moment some of the positive criticisms on the
Christian heaven, and then apply them to the proposed substitute. The
belief in heaven, say the positivists, is to be set aside for two great
reasons. In the first place there is no objective proof of its
existence, and in the second place there is subjective proof of its
impossibility. Not only is it not deducible, but it is not even
thinkable. Give the imagination _carte blanche_ to construct it, and
the imagination will either do nothing, or will do something ridiculous.
'_My position [with regard to this matter]_' says a popular living
writer,[27] '_is this--The idea of a glorified energy in an ampler life,
is an idea utterly incompatible with exact thought, one which evaporates
in contradictions, in phrases, which when pressed have no meaning._'

Now if this criticism has the least force, as used against the Christian
heaven, it has certainly far more as used against the future glories of
humanity. The positivists ask the Christians how they expect to enjoy
themselves in heaven. The Christians may, with far more force, ask the
positivists how they expect to enjoy themselves on earth. For the
Christians' heaven being _ex hypothesi_ an unknown world, they do not
stultify their expectations from being unable to describe them. On the
contrary it is a part of their faith that they are indescribable. But
the positivists' heaven is altogether in this world; and no mystical
faith has any place in their system. In this case, therefore, whatever
we may think of the other, it is plain that the tests in question a