certain difference, however, between the two cases which I am anxious to
accentuate. The etcher runs no risk of any kind by his rule of
abstinence. He refrains from several common indulgences, but he denies
himself nothing that is necessary to health. I may even go farther, and
say that the rules which he observes for the sake of perfection in his
art, might be observed with advantage by many who are not artists, for
the sake of their own tranquillity, without the loss of anything but
pleasure. The rules which Comte made for himself involved, on the other
hand, a great peril. In detaching himself so completely from the
interests and ways of thinking of ordinary men, he elaborated, indeed,
the conceptions of the positive philosophy, but arrived afterwards at a
peculiar kind of intellectual decadence from which it is
possible--probable even--that the rough common sense of the newspapers
might have preserved him. They would have saved him, I seriously
believe, from that mysticism which led to the invention of a religion
far surpassing in unreasonableness the least rational of the creeds of
tradition. It is scarcely imaginable, except on the supposition of
actual insanity, that any regular reader of the _Times_, the _Temps_,
the _Daily News_, and the _Saturday Review_, should believe the human
race to be capable of receiving as the religion of its maturity the
Comtist Trinity and the Comtist Virgin Mother. A Trinity consisting of
the Great Being (or humanity), the Great Fetish (or the earth), and the
Great Midst (or space); a hope for the human race (how unphysiological!)
that women might ultimately arrive at maternity independently of virile
help,--these are conceptions so remote, not only from the habits of
modern thought, but (what is more important) from its tendencies, that
they could not occur to a mind in regular communication with its
contemporaries.

"If you should transfer the amount of your reading day by day from the
newspaper to the standard authors?" To this suggestion of Emerson's it
may be answered that the loss would be greater than the gain. The
writers of Queen Anne's time could educate an Englishman of Queen Anne's
time, but they can only partially educate an Englishman of Queen
Victoria's time. The mind is like a merchant's ledger, it requires to be
continually posted up to the latest date. Even the last telegram may
have upset some venerable theory that has been received as infallible
for ages.

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