stant,
painful, and often unsuccessful effort. A nature that is strung to the
saintly or the heroic level will find itself placed in a jarring world,
will provoke much friction and opposition, and will be pained by many
things in which a lower nature would placidly acquiesce. The highest
form of intellectual virtue is that love of truth for its own sake which
breaks up prejudices, tempers enthusiasm by the full admission of
opposing arguments and qualifying circumstances, and places in the
sphere of possibility or probability many things which we would gladly
accept as certainties. Candour and impartiality are in a large degree
virtues of temperament; but no one who has any real knowledge of human
nature can doubt how much more pleasurable it is to most men to live
under the empire of invincible prejudice, deliberately shutting out
every consideration that could shake or qualify cherished beliefs.
'God,' says Emerson, 'offers to every mind its choice between truth and
repose. Take which you please. You can never have both.' One of the
strongest arguments of natural religion rests upon the fact that virtue
so often fails to bring its reward; upon the belief that is so deeply
implanted in human nature that this is essentially unjust and must in
some future state be remedied.

For such reasons as these I believe it to be impossible to identify
virtue with happiness, and the views of the opposite school seem to me
chiefly to rest upon an unnatural and deceptive use of words. Even when
the connection between virtue and pleasure is most close, it is true, as
the old Stoics said, that though virtue gives pleasure, this is not the
reason why a good man will practise it; that pleasure is the companion
and not the guide of his life; that he does not love virtue because it
gives pleasure, but it gives pleasure because he loves it.[8] A true
account of human nature will recognise that it has the power of aiming
at something which is different from happiness and something which may
be intelligibly described as higher, and that on the predominance of
this loftier aim the nobility of life essentially depends. It is not
even true that the end of man should be to find peace at the last. It
should be to do his duty and tell the truth.

But while this great truth of the existence of a higher aim than
happiness should be always maintained, the relations between morals and
happiness are close and intimate and well worthy of investigation.