e most successful
life of vice, must be miserable when compared with the most painful life
of virtue, and miserable in a very high degree; for morality is
momentous exactly in proportion to the interval between the things to be
gained and escaped by it. And unless this interval be a very profound
one, the language at present current as to the importance of virtue, the
dignity of life, and the earnestness of the moral struggle, will be
altogether overstrained and ludicrous.

Now is such a happiness a reality or is it a myth? That is the great
question. Can human life, cut off utterly from every hope beyond
itself--can human life supply it? If it cannot, then evidently there
can be no morality without religion. But perhaps it can. Perhaps life
has greater capacities than we have hitherto given it credit for.
Perhaps this happiness may be really close at hand for each of us, and
we have only overlooked it hitherto because it was too directly before
our eyes. At all events, wherever it is let it be pointed out to us. It
is useless, as we have seen, if not generally presentable. To those who
most need it, it is useless until presented. Indeed, until it is
presented we are but acting on the maxim of its advocates by refusing to
believe in its existence. '_No simplicity of mind_,' says Professor
Clifford, '_no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of
questioning all that we believe_.'

The question, then, that we want answered has by this time, I think,
been stated with sufficient clearness, and its importance and its
legitimacy been placed beyond a doubt. I shall now go on to explain in
detail how completely unsatisfactory are the answers that are at present
given it; how it is evaded by some and begged by others; and how those
that are most plausible are really made worthless, by a subtle but
profound defect.

These answers divide themselves into two classes, which, though
invariably confused by those that give them, are in reality quite
distinct and separable. Professor Huxley, one of the most vigorous of
our positive thinkers, shall help us to understand these. He is going to
tell us, let us remember, about the '_highest good_'--the happiness, in
other words, that we have just been discussing--the secret of our life's
worth, and the test of all our conduct. This happiness he divides into
two kinds.[8] He says that there are two things that we may mean when we
speak about it. We may mean the happiness of a