recognise real government, then
they must suppose that, behind those mere mental abstractions, laws or
order of Nature, there must be some lawgiver or other being that
originally issued the laws, or ordained the order, and still enforces
them, or maintains it. But if this be the positivist faith, then, that
we may discover its other self, we have only to go still further back;
as far back, however, as to the theological stage, supposed to have been
so early left behind, yes, even unto the deities or deity that the
metaphysical entities had displaced. Positivism, in short, is in this
dilemma: either the mode of thought claimed by it as peculiarly its own
is simply that process so justly ridiculed by Comte himself as the 'naif
reproduction of phenomena as the reason for themselves,' and by Mr.
Lewes as 'a restatement' (by way of explanation) 'of the facts to be
explained;' or it is at any rate nothing more than a return, either to
the metaphysical or to the theological mode of thought, according as one
or the other is adopted of the only two interpretations that can
possibly be placed on its own nomenclature. A new mode it certainly is
not. It is either no mode of thought at all, but merely an empty form of
words; or it is at best only a new name for one or other of two
old-fashioned modes, both of which its author denounces as false from
the beginning, and now worn out and obsolete into the bargain.

Of other features of Comtist philosophy it would be out of place to
speak here,[48] where, indeed, that philosophy would not have been
mentioned at all but for its having been transformed by its author into
a religion, and that, too, an atheistical religion--the 'Religion of
Humanity.' To myself, as to most people, a religion without a God is a
contradiction in terms. To constitute what is almost universally
understood by religion it does not suffice that there be a 'creed or
conviction claiming authority over the whole of human life: a belief or
set of beliefs deliberately adopted respecting human destiny and duty,
to which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all his actions ought
to be subordinate:' nor that there be in addition 'a sentiment connected
with this creed or capable of being invoked by it, sufficiently powerful
to give it, in fact, the authority over human conduct to which it lays
claim in theory:' nor yet that there be, moreover, 'an ideal object, the
believer's attachment and sense of duty towards which ar