tific Philosophy, issuing forth into a moral and religious scheme for the entire conduct of life: public and private, personal and social. It aims at a permanent harmony between Thought, Feeling, and Action. And its key-note is the need for some SYNTHESIS-i.e., for some organic unity, to weld into one common life our intellectual, our affective, and our active propensities. The anarchy and failures we see around us arise from this: that our science is not inspired by religion, our religion is not founded on science, and our practical conduct is most imperfectly guided either by religion or by science. The paramount conception of Positivism is the Synthesis, or harmonising of all three sides of human life.

It is thus forced to take a wide range, and to deal with the entire history of Religion on a common scheme. And this forms the main difficulty which it has to encounter, and explains the antipathy it often arouses in the specialist schools of our day. Our age is one of Analysis,-of fissiparous research. The Positive scheme is a search for Synthesis-a combination of knowledge with sympathy and with action.

In dealing with objections, I shall group them into four leading classes and schools of thought. I shall seek to deal with these, not in the least in a combative spirit and in a dialectic tone-but solely to compare our theory with that of others, and merely in order to throw light on our own. Controversy for the sake of victory is as useless as it is contemptible; but the progress of

religious and of philosophical truth has often been signally advanced by the instrument of genuine controversy, where the only end in view was honest, respectful, and searching comparison of opinions. The groups will be:

(1) The orthodox objections. The criticisms of the theological schools proper, whether in the Catholic or Protestant forms; and therein we shall make clearer the contrast between demonstration and revelation as a basis for religion.

(2) The metaphysical objections. The criticisms of the deistical schools, which rest on Natural Theology rather than Revelation, and trust to ultimate intuitions in lieu of scientific demonstration.

(3) The philosophical and literary objections. Criticisms from those who, rejecting both revelation and intuition as a basis for philosophy, oppose the idea of any general Synthesis.

(4) The scientific and agnostic objections. Criticism from the evolutionary, materialist, and secularist schools, and the contrast of Positivism with Ethical culture entirely devoid of any religious element.

These are four of the main classes of objections, and each of them is fairly entitled to be heard and to have a plain reply. There are certainly many other grounds of objection to our views, such as the individualist, the socialist, the democratic, the autocratic doctrines. There are the anarchic and democratic schools, the apostles of equality in the sexes in all functions of so

ciety, and the doctrine of absolute rights inherent in each adult, and paramount to any social institution. But all of these, and many others of the same kind, may fairly be grouped under some of the religious or philosophical groups already mentioned. It will be found that a thorough examination of these four classes of objections and the counter statement of the Positive view on each head, will amount in effect to a summary of the intellectual principles on which the Religion of Humanity is built.

The field so sketched forth is very wide; but it is impossible to give the slightest notion of Positivism as a system without touching on a wide field. Its claim to find some Synthesis of human life implies a field coextensive with life. But it causes a difficulty to those who take a first view, or a hasty view of the Positive aim. Such persons hear of it as a religious scheme, and they come down to a Hall, where they hear perhaps some Doctor of Medicine lecturing on the nervous system and the analysis of the Brain, or, it may be, they hear a Professor of history giving an account of Rousseau and the Jacobins in the French Revolution-and they go away saying, "What has this to do with Religion? This is what one expects in a Literary and Scientific Institute, but not in a Chapel!"

It may be, that they have heard of Positivism as a system of social organisation for the better arrangement of Industry, and they find us discussing the Laws of Thought, or the nature of the Soul, the relations be

tween Life and Death, the spirit and the bodily organs -and they wonder what this has to do with economic and social facts.

Again, they have heard of Positivism as a scheme of the philosophy of the sciences, and they find us discussing the economy of the Home, the education of the young and the functions in society of men and women, or, it may be, debating the Irish question, or the problem of China, of Egypt, of India, or of South Africa. They think that such political debates do not obtrude themselves on the scientific addresses at the Royal Society or the Royal Institution.

The effect of this may be somewhat miscellaneous to those who do no more than take a casual and superficial glance at Positivism as a whole. But it is unavoidable -nay rather, it is the true force of our position. The central idea of Positivism is simply this: that, until our dominant convictions can be got into one plane with our deepest affections and also with our practical energies; until our most sacred emotions, whether in our homes or in the depths of the silent heart, have been correlated with our root beliefs and also with our noblest ambition, that is, until one great object is ever present to intellect, heart, and energy-human life can never be sound, healthy, or harmoniously ordered.

They are wholly mistaken who take Positivism to be merely a novel mode of satisfying man's inherent craving for some object of Devotion-who think that its aim is to replace God by Humanity and to substitute

human saints for Christ-that it is only, as some jesters have fancied, an atheistical kind of Salvation Army. All that is mere ribaldry. The external acts of worship are to the rational Positivist secondary and variable convictions, and no scheme of heavenly and personal Salvation can have any analogy at all with a Synthesis of practical life.

Nor are they less mistaken who suppose that the end of Positivism is to clear up some philosophical conundrums: to tabulate the sciences to the satisfaction of learned specialists, to enable the public to classify the sciences, or to arrive at useful truths in a new and compendious way. It has really no bearing on competitive examinations, nor any relation to academic degrees. "Not to know-but to act" said the greatest of philosophers: and this is the practical motto of Positivism also.

And it would be quite as great an error to suppose Positivism to be in aim merely a new form of Socialism, or a mere social economy of any kind; that its business is to abolish any existing type of society and put in its place a brand-new society of its own, warranted to remedy all present evils and to found a social millennium. That may be the aim of Socialism in some of its various forms. But the cardinal idea of Positivism is that our existing social economy is the result of defective intellectual training, neglected moral and religious training, and anarchical habits of practical life. And that no new social economy is possible at all without an