mental energies
without a leader. A new object instantly becomes a necessity. They are
ethical Don Quixotes in want of a Dulcinea; the best they can find is
happiness and the progress of Humanity; and to this their imagination
soon gives the requisite glow. Their strong intellects, their activity,
and their literary culture each supplements the power that it
undoubtedly does give, with a sense of knowing the world that is
altogether fictitious. They imagine that their own narrow lives, their
own feeble temptations, and their own exceptional ambitions represent
the universal elements of human life and character; and they thus expect
that an object which has really been but the creature of an impulse in
themselves, will be the creator of a like impulse in others; and that in
the case of others, it will revolutionise the whole natural character,
whereas it has only been a symbol of it in their own.

Most of our positive moralists, at least in this country, have been and
are people of such excellent character, and such earnest and high
purpose, that there is something painful in having to taunt them with an
ignorance which is not their own fault, and which must make their whole
position ridiculous. The charge, however, is one that it is quite
necessary to make, as we shall never properly estimate their system if
we pass it over. It will be said, probably, that the simplicity as to
worldly matters I attribute to them, so far from telling against them,
is really essential to their character as moral teachers. And to moral
teachers of a certain kind it may be essential. But it is not so to
them. The religious moralist might well instruct the world, though he
knew little of its ways and passions; for the aim of his teaching was to
withdraw men from the world. But the aim of the positive moralist is
precisely opposite; it is to keep men in the world. It is not to teach
men to despise this life, but to adore it. The positions of the two
moralists are in fact the exact converses of each other. For the
divine, earth is an illusion, heaven a reality; for the positivist,
earth is a reality, and heaven an illusion. The former in his retirement
studied intensely the world that he thought real, and he could do this
the better for being not distracted by the other. The positivists
imitate the divine in neglecting what they think is an illusion; but
they do not attempt to imitate him in studying what they think is the
reality. The conseq