Obviously, Mr. Harrison has a misgiving as to the force which his argument can be expected to exert on ordinary mortals or for the daily purposes of life. Though he says that the truth he teaches “is not confined to the great,” and adds the beautiful remark that “in some infinitesimal degree the humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a wave--no, more than a wave, a life--through the evergrowing harmony of human society,” yet even while he alleges that a concern for such posthumous activity is “no doubt now in England the great motive of virtue and energy,” and asks, “Can we conceive a more potent stimulus to daily and hourly striving after a true life?”[6] he says in the next page that “it would be an endless inquiry to trace the means whereby this sense of posthumous participation in the life of our fellows _can be extended to_ _the mass_, as it certainly affects already the thoughtful and refined.” Honestly, he admits that it is “impossible it should become universal and capable of overcoming selfishness” “without an education, a new social opinion without a religion; I mean an organized religion, not a vague metaphysic.” “Make it,” he cries, with almost the enthusiasm of a discoverer, “at once the basis of philosophy, the standard of right and wrong, and the centre of a religion,” and then it may perhaps be achieved. But, in sober truth, what “education” or “organized religion” (_i.e._, of course, Comtism) can possibly transform this remote anticipation of the results of our actions after we are dead into a practical lever for daily duty for the great bulk of mankind? It is the specialty of all vice to be selfishly indifferent to the injurious consequences of our actions, even to their immediate and visible consequences, to those nearest to us. Is it not almost ludicrous to think of exhorting the drunkard who sees his wife and children starving round him to-day, or the ill-conducted girl who is breaking her mother’s heart, or the hard task-master or landlord who is grinding the faces of the poor to fill his pocket, to refrain from their misdoings on account of the evil which they will cause fifty years hence to people unborn? Or let us try to apply the principle to that sound mass of every-day English virtue which is, after all, the very air we breathe,--the daily dutifulness, the purity, the truthfulness, the loving-kindness of our homes, the beautiful patience to be witnessed beside a thousand sick-beds. Were we to ask the simple-hearted men and meek women who exemplify these virtues whether they ever think of the excellent “posthumous activities” which they will exert on their surviving acquaintances, would they not be utterly bewildered? The clergyman (or let us have the Comtist philosopher) who will go through a workhouse ward, or round the cottages of a village, and offer such a suggestion as a topic of encouragement, would, I think, effect a very small measure of reformation. Nor do I think it is necessarily a low type of mind