cial 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. I conceive those to
be altogether wrong who say that such a state would be one of any wild
license, or anything that we should call very revolting depravity.
Offences, certainly, that we consider the most abominable would
doubtless be committed continually and as matters of course. Such a
feeling as shame about them would be altogether unknown. But the normal
forms of passion would remain, I conceive, the most important; and it
is probable, that though no form of vice would have the least anathema
attached to it, the rage for the sexual pleasures would be far less
fierce than it is in many cases now. The sort of condition to which the
world would be tending would be a condition rather of dulness than what
we, in our parlance, should now call degradation. Indeed the state of
things to which the positive view of life seems to promise us, and which
to some extent it is actually now bringing on us, is exactly what was
predicted long ago, with an accuracy that seems little less than
inspired, at the end of Pope's _Dunciad_.

_In vain, in vain: the all-composing hour
Resistless falls! the muse obeys the power.
She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold
Of night primaeval and of chaos old.
Before her, fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
Th