It will have nothing added to it, but it will have much taken from it.
Everything will have gone that is at present keenest in it--joys and miseries as well.

In this way positivism is indeed an engine of change, and may inaugurate if not complete a most momentous kind of progress.
That progress is the gradual de-religionizing of life, the slow sublimating out of it of its concrete theism--the slow destruction of its whole moral civilisation.

And as this progress continues there will not only fade out of the human consciousness the things I have before dwelt on--all capacity for the keener pains and pleasures, but there will fade out of it also that strange sense which is the union of all these--the white light woven of all these rays; that is, the vague but deep sense of some special dignity in ourselves--a sense which we feel to be our birthright, inalienable except by our own act and deed; a sense which, at present, in success sobers us, and in failure sustains us, and which is visible more or less distinctly in our manners, in our bearing, and even in the very expression of the human countenance: it is, in other words, the sense that life is worth living, not accidentally but essentially.

And as this sense goes its place will be taken by one precisely opposite--the sense that life, in so far as it is worth living at all, is worth living not essentially, but accidentally; that it depends entirely upon what of its pleasures we can each one of us realise; that it will vary as a positive quantity, like wealth, and that it may become also a various quantity, like poverty; and that behind and beyond these vicissitudes it can have no abiding value.
To realise fully a state of things like this is for us not possible.

But we can, however, understand something of its nature.