It may be asked why, if we think it false, we should trouble our heads about it. And the answer to this is to be found in the present age itself. Whatever may be the future fate of positive thought, whatever confidence may be felt by any of us that it cannot in the long run gain a final hold upon the world, its present power and the present results of it cannot be overlooked. That degradation of life that I have been describing as the result of positivism--of what the age we live in calls the only rational view of things--may indeed never be completed; but let us look carefully around us, and we shall see that it is already begun. The process, it is true, is at present not very apparent; or if it is, its nature is altogether mistaken. This, however, only makes it more momentous; and the great reason why it is desirable to deal so rudely with the optimist system of the positivists is that it lies like a misty veil over the real surface of facts, and conceals the very change that it professes to make impossible. It is a kind of moral chloroform, which, instead of curing an illness, only makes us fatally unconscious of its most alarming symptoms.
But though an effort be thus required to realise our true condition, it is an effort which, before all things, we ought to make; and which, if we try, we can all make readily. A little careful memory, a little careful observation, will open the eyes of most of us to the real truth of things; it will reveal to us a spectacle that is indeed appalling, and the more candidly we survey it, the more shall we feel aghast at it. To begin, then, let us once more consider two notorious facts: first, that over all the world at the present day a denial is spreading itself of all religions dogmas, more complete than has ever before been known; and, secondly, that in spite of this speculative denial, and in the places where it has done its work most thoroughly, a mass of moral earnestness seems to survive untouched. I do not attempt to deny the fact; I desire, on the contrary, to draw all attention to it. But the condition in which it survives is commonly not in the least realised. The class of men concerned with it are like soldiers who may be fighting more bravely perhaps than ever; but who are fighting, though none observe it, with the death-wound under their uniforms. Of all the signs of the times, these high-minded unbelievers are thought to be the most reassuring; but really they are the very reverse of this. The reason why their true condition has passed unnoticed is, that it is a condition that is naturally silent, and that has great difficulty in finding a mouthpiece. The only two parties who have had any interest in commenting on it have been the very parties least able to understand, and most certain to distort it. They have been either the professed champions of theism, or else the visionary optimists of positivism; the former of whom have had no sympathy with positive principles, and the latter no discernment of their results. The class of men we are considering are equally at variance with both of these; they agree with each in one respect, and in another they agree with neither. They agree with the one that religious belief is false; they agree with the other that unbelief is miserable. What wonder then that they should have kept their condition to themselves? Nearly all public dealing with it has been left to men who can praise the only doctrines that they can preach as true, or who else can condemn as false the doctrines that they deplore as mischievous. As for the others, whose mental and moral convictions are at variance, they have neither any heart to proclaim the one, nor any intellectual standpoint from which to proclaim the other. Their only impulse is to struggle and to endure in silence. Let us, however, try to intrude upon their privacy, even though it be rudely and painfully, and see what their real state is; for it is these men who are the true product of the present age, its most special and distinguishing feature, and the first-fruits of what we are told is to be the philosophy of the enlightened future.