bility, and denied that any man can be benefited or injured by
any other. Our moral ambition has overleaped itself and carried us into
a non-natural world where morality is impotent and unmeaning.

[Sidenote: The soul of positivism in all ideals.]

Post-rational systems accordingly mark no real advance and offer no
genuine solution to spiritual enigmas. The saving force each of them
invokes is merely some remnant of that natural energy which animates the
human animal. Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man
at the lowest ebb of his fortunes; it is as far as possible from being
the source of that normal vitality which subsequently, if his fortunes
mend, he may gradually recover. Under the same religion, with the same
posthumous alternatives and mystic harmonies hanging about them,
different races, or the same race at different periods, will manifest
the most opposite moral characteristics. Belief in a thousand hells and
heavens will not lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back the
passionate from passion; while a newly planted and ungalled community,
in blessed forgetfulness of rewards or punishments, of cosmic needs or
celestial sanctions, will know how to live cheerily and virtuously for
life's own sake, putting to shame those thin vaticinations. To hope for
a second life, to be had gratis, merely because this life has lost its
savour, or to dream of a different world, because nature seems too
intricate and unfriendly, is in the end merely to play with words; since
the supernatural has no permanent aspect or charm except in so far as it
expresses man's natural situation and points to the satisfaction of his
earthly interests. What keeps supernatural morality, in its better
forms, within the limits of sanity is the fact that it reinstates in
practice, under novel associations and for motives ostensibly different,
the very natural virtues and hopes which, when seen to be merely
natural, it had thrown over with contempt. The new dispensation itself,
if treated in the same spirit, would be no less contemptible; and what
makes it genuinely esteemed is the restored authority of those human
ideals which it expresses in a fable.

The extent of this moral restoration, the measure in which nature is
suffered to bloom in the sanctuary, determines the value of
post-rational moralities. They may preside over a good life, personal
or communal, when their symbolism, though cumbrous, is not deceptive;
when th