If such be the thought to them whose natural heritage stands strong, fringed with luxurious hope to live beloved, to die regretted; what will the "overshadowing" be when it passes, like a plague breath, over the children of toil and anxiety, over them whose life is at best hard, and their lot depressed and without "illusions"? Will they not want their strong sensations? Will they respect any law, human or divine, which stands between them and their enjoyments? Will they not crush all who bar their pleasures, aye, choke them in their own blood? Why not? The opiate comes to all at last. 'Tis an act of oblivion! The overshadowing will cover all. And this is the coming creed of the 19th century. To return to Comte, about whom I might say much, but must not;--of course, he had no foresight of anything worse than an immediate realization of his crowning ideas--sociality, fraternity, Positivism. Europe split into small states; women made incapable of property, but held objects of religious worship; men worked on a communistic principle; an oligarchy of rich; a spirituality of Positive believers, with a supreme infallible pontiff at their head; Paris the seat of infallibility and of order. Clotilde had shown Comte a principle antagonistic to, and predominating over, all egoism; Altruism was to burn out of men all selfish aims, nay, the ordinary feelings of a man! A rigorous rule of life was to aid, and a religion without a God to enforce, this new law. Two hours a day, divided into three private services, were to be spent in the adoration of Humanity under the form of a living or dead woman. The image of the fair idol, dress, posture, everything was to be brought distinctly to mind; and the whole soul to be prostrated in her honour. Comte, it has been said, gave woman everything except justice. There is a grave moral in this tale. Theology was extinguished; but the desire to worship burned on--a fire unquenchable. Is that desire, or is it not, a broad reality, an inalienable truth of our nature? Comte accepted it for himself, and not for himself alone, but for our whole human race. Along with it he accepted the only principle which could bestow universal validity. Our moral intuitions were acknowledged safe guides, and something more; the rulers of an intellectual world, the revealers of truth higher than all beside. Often and often he asserted the dominion of heart over mind. Probably, if Comte had lived longer he would have acknowledged other revelations of our moral nature. Moral causation, for example. That strange phrase of his--"a modifiable fatality," self-contradiction in words, suicide in sense, what did it portend? Was it the first sound of a marriage-bell, freedom and duty once again united? A change of his system wonderful to contemplate, yet not more wonderful than the state in which he left it.