er and far more real to them
than these others can ever be; and yet the imagination has so failed to
keep this before them, that its small effect upon their lives is a
commonplace with the positivists themselves. How then can these latter
hope that their own pale and distant ideal will have a more vivid effect
on the world than that near and glowing one, in whose place they put it?
Will it incite men to virtues to which heaven could not incite them? or
lure them away from vices from which hell-fire would not scare them?
Before it can do so, it is plain that human nature must have completely
changed, and its elements have been re-mixed, in completely new
proportions. In a state of things where such a result was possible, a
man would do a better day's work for a penny to be given to his unborn
grandson, than he would now do for a pound to be paid to himself at
sunset.

For argument's sake, however, let us suppose such a change possible. Let
us suppose the imagination to be so developed that the remote end of
progress--that happier state of men in some far off century--is ever
vividly present to us as a possibility we may help to realise. Another
question still remains for us. To preserve this happiness for others, we
are told, we must to a large extent sacrifice our own. Is it in human
nature to make this sacrifice? The positive moralists assure us that it
is, and for this reason. Man, they say, is an animal who enjoys
vicariously with almost as much zest as in his own person; and therefore
to procure a greater pleasure for others makes him far happier than to
procure a less one for himself. In this statement, as I have observed in
an earlier chapter, there is no doubt a certain general truth; but how
far it will hold good in particular instances depends altogether on
particular circumstances. It depends on the temperament of the person
who is to make the sacrifice, on the nature of his feelings towards the
person for whom he is to make it, and on the proportion between the
pleasure he is to forego himself, and the pleasure he is to secure for
another. Now if we consider human nature as it is, and the utmost
development of it that on positive grounds is possible, the conditions
that can produce the requisite self-sacrifice will be found to be
altogether wanting. The future we are to labour for, even when viewed in
its brightest light, will only excel the present in having fewer
miseries. So far as its happiness goes it wi