These last, indeed, are just the suppositions that they do make.
Between our human nature and the nature they desiderate there is a deep and fordless river, over which they can throw no bridge, and all their talk supposes that we shall be able to fly or wade across it, or else that it will dry up of itself.
_Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis, at ille Labitur et labetur, in omne volubilis aevum._ So utterly grotesque and chimerical is this whole positive theory of progress, that, as an outcome of the present age, it seems little short of a miracle.

Professing to embody what that age considers its special characteristics, what it really embodies is the most emphatic negation of these.

It professes to rest on experience, and yet no Christian legend ever contradicted experience more.

It professes to be sustained by proof, and yet the professions of no conjuring quack ever appealed more exclusively to credulity.
Its appearance, however, will cease to be wonderful, and its real significance will become more apparent, if we consider the class of thinkers who have elaborated and popularised it.

They have been men and women, for the most part, who have had the following characteristics in common.