eir objects, and every person in the community were
free, and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life being no
longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.
And I felt that unless I could see some better hope than this for human
happiness in general, my dejection must continue.'_ It is true that in
Mill's case the dejection did not continue; and that in certain ways at
which it is not yet time to touch, he succeeded, to his own
satisfaction, in finding the end he was thus asking for. I only quote
him to show how necessary he considered such an end to be. He
acknowledged the fact, not only theoretically, or with his lips, but by
months of misery, by intermittent thoughts of suicide, and by years of
recurring melancholy. Some ultimate end of action, some kind of
satisfying happiness--this, and this alone, he felt, could give any
meaning to work, or make possible any kind of virtue. And a yet later
authority has told us precisely the same thing. He has told us that the
one great question that education is of value for answering, is this
very question that was so earnestly asked by Mill. '_The ultimate end of
education_,' says Professor Huxley, '_is to promote morality and
refinement, by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by leading
them to see that the highest, as it is the only content, is to be
attained not by grovelling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense,
but by continually striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in
eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the
highest good--"a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night_."' And these
words are an excellent specimen of the general moral exhortations of the
new school.

Now all this is very well as far as it goes; and were there not one
thing lacking, it would be just the answer that we are at present so
anxious to elicit. But the one thing lacking, is enough to make it
valueless. It may mean a great deal; but there is no possibility of
saying exactly what it means. Before we can begin to strive towards the
'highest good,' we must know something of what this 'highest good' is.
We must make this 'higher ideal' stand and unfold itself. If it cannot
be made to do this, if it vanishes into mist as we near it, and takes a
different shape to each of us as we recede from it; still more, if only
some can see it, and to others it is quite invisible--then we must
simply set it down as an illusion, an