He felt that the distinct recognition of positive thought as supreme within the widest limits then covered by it, would ultimately lead to the banishment of theological thought to a region of its own, too distant and too infertile for men to weary themselves in pursuit of it.

His conception was to supplant the old ways of thinking and the old objects of intellectual interest by new ones.

He trusted to the intrinsic fitness and value of the new knowledge and new views of human life, to displace the old.

This marks him for a constructive thinker.

He replaced barren theological interests that had outlived their time, by all those great groups of living and fruitful interests which glow and sparkle in the volumes of the Encyclopaedia.