which does not project itself much into the future, whether in this world or the next; but which is vividly affected by the idea of a _present_ righteous law claiming immediate obedience, and a _present_ adorable God watching whether that obedience be paid, but which takes in even the idea of immortality more as adding an infinite dignity to moral things and human souls than as a direct motive to moral action. To such a person, the promise of “posthumous activities” is as remote and inoperative a principle as it is possible to propose; and he can scarcely help smiling at it, as he does at the observation of Pliny, that the “happiest of all possible anticipations is the certain expectation of an honorable and undying renown.” Posthumous activity affords a far nobler motive than posthumous fame; but they both appeal to sentiments which have little weight with the majority of minds, and no weight at all with a great number not undeserving of respect. The truth seems to be that the leading Comtists and Agnostics of the day not only belong to an exceptional type of human nature, little touched by grosser impulses and highly sensitive to the most rarefied order of influences, but are unable to descend from such altitude, and realize what ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women are made of. As Mr. Darwin unconsciously betrayed that he had never once had occasion to repent an act of unkindness, when he theorized about repentance as _beginning_ by a spontaneous reversion to sympathy and good-will to the people we have injured (in bold contradiction to Tacitus’ too true maxim, “_Humani generis proprium est odisse quem laeseris_”), so the disciples of Comte unwittingly allow us to perceive that they really consider an exalted and far-reaching interest in the welfare of our kind as the sort of motive which is already “now in England the great motive of virtue and energy.”