not far from any one of them, but which is practical and
pressing--I might almost say portentous--and which is something
literally unexampled in the past history of mankind.

I am aware that this position is not only not at first sight obvious,
but that, even when better understood, it will probably be called false.
My first care, therefore, will be to explain it at length, and clearly.
For this purpose we must consider two points in order; first, what is
the exact doubt we intend to express by our question; and next, why in
our day this doubt should have such a special and fresh significance.

Let us then make it quite plain, at starting, that when we ask 'Is life
worth living?' we are not asking whether its balance of pains is
necessarily and always in excess of its balance of pleasures. We are not
asking whether any one has been, or whether any one is happy. To the
unjaundiced eye nothing is more clear than that happiness of various
kinds has been, and is, continually attained by men. And ingenious
pessimists do but waste their labour when they try to convince a happy
man that he really must be miserable. What I am going to discuss is not
the superfluous truism that life has been found worth living by many;
but the profoundly different proposition that it ought to be found worth
living by all. For this is what life is pronounced to be, when those
claims are made for it that at present universally are made; when, as a
general truth, it is said to be worth living; or when any of those
august epithets are applied to it that are at present applied so
constantly. At present, as we all know, it is called sacred, solemn,
earnest, significant, and so forth. To withhold such epithets is
considered a kind of blasphemy. And the meaning of all such language is
this: it means that life has some deep inherent worth of its own, beyond
what it can acquire or lose by the caprice of circumstance--a worth,
which though it may be most fully revealed to a man, through certain
forms of success, is yet not destroyed or made a minus quantity by
failure. Certain forms of love, for instance, are held in a special way
to reveal this worth to us; but the worth that a successful love is thus
supposed to reveal is a worth that a hopeless love is supposed not to
destroy. The worth is a part of life's essence, not a mere chance
accident, as health or riches are; and we are supposed to lose it by no
acts but our own.

Now it is evident that such