The founder of “Positivism,” the Religion of Humanity, proposes to dedicate the days of the year to the leaders of progress, and inscribe our places of worship with the names of discoverers, reformers, and philosophers rather than of bigots and world-despising saints. And for the sake of those who would not wish to repeat the mistake of sacrificing the present to the past, the builders of those sanctuaries should add a temple of Friendship. From the adoration of self-torturing fanatics, from the worship of sorrow and the love of enemies, mankind will at last revert to the ancestral plan of elective affinities, and the dread of preferring natural to theological duties will not much longer prevent our fellow-men from recognizing their obligations to their earthly benefactors. CHAPTER XV. EDUCATION. A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT. The doctrine of Pythagoras, the philosophic Messiah of Paganism, included the strange tenet of metempsychosis. After death, held the confessors of that dogma, the souls of men and brutes would reappear in new forms, higher or lower, according to the character-traits of the dying individual. Thus the soul of a wealthy glutton might be reborn in a pig-sty, that of a high-minded peasant perhaps on the throne of a king. Death and rebirth are the upper and lower spokes of a wheel that turns and turns forever, and in the persons of their neighbors the Pythagoreans saw wanderers that might have walked this earth thousands of years ago. The strangeness of such a theory is still increased by the circumstance that its teacher was an eminent astronomer, an accomplished mathematician, and the leader of a memorable hygienic reform. Our astonishment is not lessened by the well-established fact that, under some form or other, the doctrine of soul-migration has for ages been the accepted creed of a large plurality of our fellow-men. It is well known, however, that to his trusted disciples Pythagoras imparted an esoteric or explanatory version of his dogmas; and if we learn that the great philosopher attached a special importance to the influence of hereditary dispositions, the truth at last dawns upon us that the doctrine of metempsychosis referred to the reappearance of individual types, passions, and dispositions in the bodily and mental characteristics of the next generation. “Parents live in their children.” The instinctive recognition of that truth reconciles our dumb fellow-creatures to the prospect of death. At the end of summer the night-moth carefully deposits her eggs in a silver cradle, hidden safe in the crevice of some sheltering nook, where they will survive the rigor of the winter and answer the first summons of spring. Having thus, as it were, insured the resurrection of her type, the parent moth quietly resigns herself to the fate of sleeping her own winter-slumber in the arms of death. On the Orinoco wounded river-turtles will use their last strength to climb the slope of some bush-hidden sand-bank,