It is the belief not only that the existing pleasures will become more diffused, but that they will, as George Eliot says, become '_more intense in diffusion_.' It is this belief on which the positivists rely to create that enthusiasm, that impassioned benevolence, which is to be the motive power of their whole ethical machinery.

They have taken away the Christian heaven, and have thus turned adrift a number of hopes and aspirations that were once powerful.

These hopes and aspirations they acknowledge to be of the first necessity; they are facts, they say, of human nature, and no higher progress would be possible without them.

What the enlightened thought is to do is not to extinguish, but to transfer them.

They are to be given a new object more satisfactory than the old one; not our own private glory in another world, but the common glory of our whole race in this.
Now let us consider for a moment some of the positive criticisms on the Christian heaven, and then apply them to the proposed substitute.