Apart from this, which is a matter of forms and words, and has no
connexion with any belief except belief in the proprieties, the severest
criticism can find nothing either worse or better, in the modes of
thinking either of our conservative or of our liberal party, than a
particularly shallow and flimsy kind of positivism. The working classes
indeed, or some portion of them, perhaps still rest their claim to
universal suffrage on abstract right, in addition to more substantial
reasons, and thus far and no farther does metaphysics prevail in the
region of English politics. But politics is not the entire art of social
existence: ethics is a still deeper and more vital part of it: and in
that, as much in England as elsewhere, the current opinions are still
divided between the theological mode of thought and the metaphysical.
What is the whole doctrine of Intuitive Morality, which reigns supreme
wherever the idolatry of Scripture texts has abated and the influence of
Bentham's philosophy has not reached, but the metaphysical state of
ethical science? What else, indeed, is the whole _a priori_ philosophy,
in morals, jurisprudence, psychology, logic, even physical science, for
it does not always keep its hands off that, the oldest domain of
observation and experiment? It has the universal diagnostic of the
metaphysical mode of thought, in the Comtean sense of the word; that of
erecting a mere creation of the mind into a test or _norma_ of external
truth, and presenting the abstract expression of the beliefs already
entertained, as the reason and evidence which justifies them.
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