Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/478

464 Let us consider what claims to godhood may be made for the Humanity immediately known to us. Unquestionably M. Comte's own doctrine, that there has been going on an evolution of mankind, implies that such portion of the "Great Being Humanity" as is formed by our own generation, is better than the average of those portions which have heretofore lived and died. What then shall we say of this better portion?

Of course we must keep out of thought all the bad conduct going on around—the prevailing dishonesty shown in adulteration by retailers and production of debased goods by manufacturers, the inefficient and dawdling work of artisans, the many fraudulent transactions of which a few are daily disclosed at trials; though why we are to exclude the blameworthy from our conception of Humanity, I do not understand. But not dwelling on this, let us contemplate first the intellectual traits, and then the moral traits, of the people who remain after leaving out the worse.

Those whose mental appetites are daily satisfied by table talk almost wholly personal, by gossiping books and novels, and by newspapers the contents of which are usually enjoyed the more in proportion as there is in them much of the scandalous or the horrible—those who, on Sunday, never working out their own beliefs, receive the weekly dole of thought called for by their state of spiritual pauperism—those who, to the ideas they received during education, add only such as are supplied by daily journals and weekly sermons, with now and then a few from books, having none of their own worth speaking of; we may be content to class as respectable in the conventional sense, though scarcely in any higher sense—still less to include them as chief components in a body exciting reverence. Even if we limit attention to those of highest culture, including all who are concerned in regulative functions, political, ecclesiastical, educational, or other, the displays of intelligence do not call forth such an emotion as that which M. Comte's theory requires us to entertain. What shall we say of the wisdom of those, including nearly all who occupy influential positions, who persist in thinking that preparation for successful and complete living (which is the purpose of rational education) is best effected by learning to speak and write after the manner of two extinct peoples, and by gaining knowledge of their chief men, their superstitions, their deeds of war, etc.—who, in their leading school, devote two hours per week to getting some ideas about the constitution of the world they are born into, and thirty-six hours per week to construing Latin and Greek and making verses, nonsensical or other; and who, in the competitive examinations they devise, give to knowledge of words double the number of marks which they give to knowledge of things? That, it seems to me, is not a very worshipful degree of intelligence which fails to recognize the obvious truth that there is an Order of Nature, pervading alike the actions going on within us