y, morality has no other test but happiness. Immorality,
therefore, can have no conceivable meaning but unhappiness, or at least
the means to it, which in this case are hardly distinguishable from the
end; and thus, according to the above rigid reasoners, the human race
will not have reached the lowest depths of misery so long as it rejects
the one thing which _ex hypothesi_ might render it less miserable.
Either then all this talk about truth must really be so much irrelevant
nonsense, or else, if it be not nonsense, the test of conduct is
something distinct from happiness. The question before us is a plain
one, which may be answered in one of two ways, but which positivism
cannot possibly answer in both. Is truth to be sought only because it
conduces to happiness, or is happiness only to be sought for when it is
based on truth? In the latter case truth, not happiness, is the test of
conduct. Are our positive moralists prepared to admit this? If so, let
them explicitly and consistently say so. Let them keep this test and
reject the other, for the two cannot be fused together.

[Greek: oxos t' aleipha t' egcheas tauto kutei
dichostatount an ou philoin prosennepois.]

This inconsistency is here, however, only a side point--a passing
illustration of the slovenliness of the positivist logic. As far as my
present argument goes, we may let this pass altogether, and allow the
joint existence of these mutually exclusive ends. What I am about to do
is to show that on positive grounds the last of these is more hopelessly
inadequate than the first--that truth as a moral end has even more of
religion in its composition than happiness, and that when this religion
goes, its value will even more hopelessly evaporate.

At first sight this may seem impossible. The devotion to truth may seem
as simple as it is sacred. But if we consider the matter further, we
shall soon think differently. To begin then; truth, as the positivists
speak of it, is plainly a thing that is to be worshipped in two
ways--firstly by its discovery, and secondly by its publication. Thus
Professor Huxley, however much it may pain him, will not hide from
himself the fact that there is no God; and however bad this knowledge
may be for humanity, his highest and most sacred duty still consists in
imparting it. Now why should this be? I ask. Is it simply because the
fact in question is the truth? That surely cannot be so, as a few other
examples will show us.