ul it may be to mislead other people, however sweet to look down
from a height on the erring throng beneath, it is neither useful nor
sweet to be ourselves at sea without a compass. We may not care to walk
by the light we have, but we do not choose to exchange it for darkness.

This reflection is most obvious with reference to the order of Nature.
Our life depends on adapting means to ends; which supposes that we know
cause and effect in the world around us. A long story is cut short by
the adage, "Knowledge is power"; otherwise rendered, "Truth is bliss".

The bearing of truth is free from all doubt when the problem is, how to
gain certain ends--how to be fed, how to get from one place to another,
how to cure disease. A new case is presented by the choice of ends. The
tyrannical French minister, when appealed to by a starving peasantry in
the terms, "We must live," replied, "I do not see the necessity". There
was here no question of true and false, no problem for science to solve.
It was a question of ends, and could not be reargued. The only possible
retort was to ask, "What does your Excellency consider a necessity?" If
the reply were, "That I and my King may rule France and be happy," then
might the starving wretches find some aid from a political scientist who
could show that, in the order of nature, ruler and people must stand or
fall together. So, it is no question of true or false in the order of
nature, whether I shall adopt, as the end of life, my own gratification
purely, the good of others purely, or part of both. In like manner the
Benthamite, who propounds happiness as the general end of human society,
cannot prove this, as Newton could prove that gravity follows the
inverse square of the distance; nor can his position be impugned in the
way that Newton impugned the vortices of Descartes, by showing that they
were at variance with fact.

There is a third case. Assertions are made out of the sphere of the
sensible world, and beyond the reach of verification by the methods of
science. There is a region of the supersensible or supernatural, where
cause and effect may be affirmed and human interests involved, but where
we cannot supply the same evidence or the same confutation as in
sublunary knowledge. That all human beings shall have an existence after
death is matter of truth or falsehood, but the evidence is of a kind
that would not be adduced for proving that a caterpillar becomes a
butterfly or that a s