We survey the past and see that its history is of
blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid
acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn
that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but
short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our
investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of
the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no
longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its
solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will
perish. The uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has
for a brief space broken the contented silence of the Universe,
will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. Imperishable
monuments and immortal deeds, death itself, and love stronger than
death, will be as though they had never been. Nor will anything
that is be better or be worse for all that the labour, genius,
devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless
generations to effect.
He continues on Positivism as an influence that cannot be
disregarded:
One of the objects of the "religion of humanity," and it is an
object beyond all praise, is to stimulate the imagination till it
lovingly embraces the remotest fortunes of the whole human family.
But in proportion as this end is successfully attained, in
proportion as we are taught by this or any other religion to
neglect the transient and the personal, and to count ourselves as
labourers for that which is universal and abiding, so surely must
be the increasing range which science is giving to our vision over
the time and spaces of the material universe, and the decreasing
importance of the place which man is seen to occupy in it, strike
coldly on our moral imagination, if so be that the material
universe is all we have to do with.
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