To a certain extent, indeed, a faith in progress is perfectly rational and well grounded.

There are many imperfections in life, which the course of events tends manifestly to lessen if not to do away with, and so far as these are concerned, improvements may go on indefinitely.
But the things that this progress touches are, as has been said before, not happiness, but the negative conditions of it.

A belief in this kind of progress is not peculiar to positivism.

It is common to all educated men, no matter what their creed may be.

What is peculiar to positivism is the strange corollary to this belief, that man's subjective powers of happiness will go on expanding likewise.