498 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. hi. 



had "been in the case of atheistic Jacobinism. And when 

 the notion (born of the statical habit of thought), that men's 

 natural ways of thinking and acting can be suddenly changed 

 by a change in philosophic formulas, was called to its aid, 

 the result was that absurdest though most logically con- 

 structed of all Utopias, the Positive Polity. 



In view of these profoundly interesting and instructive 

 conclusions, can we not, by sheer contrast, immediately 

 discern what must be the critical attitude of any philosophy 

 which is based upon the thorough and consistent recognition 

 of the Doctrine of Evolution ? We too, as well as the Posi- 

 tivists, have our ideal state of society, — a state well described 

 in the passage above quoted from Mr. Spencer, in which the 

 greatest possible fulness of life shall be ensured to each 

 member of the community by the circumstance that in the 

 long course of social equilibration the desires of each indi- 

 vidual shall have become slowly moulded into harmony with 

 the coexistent desires of neighbouring individuals. But as 

 cataclysms and miracles and sudden creations have no place 

 in our purely dynamical theory of things, we do not expect 

 to see this ultimate state of society realized within half a 

 century. We know full well that it can be realized only in 

 the indefinitely remote future. Nay, since the conception 

 of absolute finality is as inconsistent with the Doctrine of 

 Evolution as is the conception of absolute beginning, we do 

 not regard it as destined ever to be absolutely realized. That 

 supreme epoch of social equilibrium in which every man 

 shall love the Lord with all his heart and his neighbour even 

 as himself, in which the beast shall have been worked out, 

 ani, in Tennyson's phrase, the ape and the tiger shall have 

 been allowed to die within us, in which egoistic or anti- 

 social impulses shall be self-restrained, and everyone shall 

 spontaneously do that which tends towards the general hap- 

 pmess. — this supreme epoch is likely for ever to remain an 

 ideal epoch which shall relatively be more and more dis- 



