The starry skies at night are doubtless an imposing spectacle; but man, on positive principles, can be no more raised by watching them than a commercial traveller can by watching a duke--probably far less: for if the duke were well behaved, the commercial traveller might perhaps learn some manners from him; but there is nothing in the panorama of the universe that can in any way be any model for the positivist.

There are but two respects in which he can compare himself to the rest of nature--firstly, as a revealed force; and, secondly, as a force that works by law.

But the forces that are revealed by the stars, for instance, are vast, and the force revealed in himself is small; and he, as he considers, is a self-determining agent, and the stars are not.

There are but two points of comparison between the two; and in these two points they are contrasts, and not likenesses.

It is true, indeed, as I said just now, that a sense of awe and of hushed solemnity is, as a fact, born in us at the spectacle of the starry heavens--world upon luminous world shining and quivering silently; it is true, too, that a spontaneous feeling connects such a sense somehow with our deepest moral being.