emotion and as a motive
to conduct, many have perceived; but we know not if any one, before M.
Comte, realized so fully as he has done, all the majesty of which that
idea is susceptible. It ascends into the unknown recesses of the past,
embraces the manifold present, and descends into the indefinite and
unforeseeable future, forming a collective Existence without assignable
beginning or end, it appeals to that feeling of the Infinite, which is
deeply rooted in human nature, and which seems necessary to the
imposingness of all our highest conceptions. Of the vast unrolling web
of human life, the part best known to us is irrevocably past; this we
can no longer serve, but can still love: it comprises for most of us the
far greater number of those who have loved us, or from whom we have
received benefits, as well as the long series of those who, by their
labours and sacrifices for mankind, have deserved to be held in
everlasting and grateful remembrance. As M. Comte truly says, the
highest minds, even now, live in thought with the great dead, far more
than with the living; and, next to the dead, with those ideal human
beings yet to come, whom they are never destined to see. If we honour as
we ought those who have served mankind in the past, we shall feel that
we are also working for those benefactors by serving that to which their
lives were devoted. And when reflection, guided by history, has taught
us the intimacy of the connexion of every age of humanity with every
other, making us see in the earthly destiny of mankind the playing out
of a great drama, or the action of a prolonged epic, all the generations
of mankind become indissolubly united into a single image, combining all
the power over the mind of the idea of Posterity, with our best feelings
towards the living world which surrounds us, and towards the
predecessors who have made us what we are. That the ennobling power of
this grand conception may have its full efficacy, we should, with M.
Comte, regard the Grand Etre, Humanity, or Mankind, as composed, in the
past, solely of those who, in every age and variety of position, have
played their part worthily in life. It is only as thus restricted that
the aggregate of our species becomes an object deserving our veneration.
The unworthy members of it are best dismissed from our habitual
thoughts; and the imperfections which adhered through life, even to
those of the dead who deserve honourable remembrance, should be no