no light whatever; whilst as to the second, it really
hangs entirely on the very point that he cited as indifferent. We must
have some knowledge, even though it be only vague and negative, of the
nature of a food, before we know whether it will be well for us in the
long run to habitually eat it, or to abstain from it.

Let us apply this illustration to love. Professor Huxley's ginger shall
stand for the sort of love he would most approve of; and love, as a
whole, will be represented by a varied dessert, of which ginger is one
of the dishes. Now what Professor Huxley has to do is to recommend this
ginger, and to show that it is divided by an infinite gulf--say from
prunes or from Huntley and Palmer's biscuits. But how is he to do this?
To say that ginger is hot is to say nothing. To many, that may condemn
instead of recommending it: and they will have as much to say for their
own tastes if they rejoin that prunes and biscuits are sweet. If he can
prove to them that what they choose is unwholesome, and that if they eat
it they will be too unwell to say their prayers, then, supposing they
want to say their prayers, he will have gained his point. But if he
cannot prove that it is unwholesome, or if his friends have no prayers
to say, his entire recommendation dwindles to a declaration of his own
personal taste. But in this case his whole tone will be different. There
will be nothing in it of the moral imperative. He will be only laughed
at and not listened to, if he proclaims his own taste in sweetmeats with
all the thunders of Sinai. And the choice between the various kinds of
love is, on positive principles, only a choice between sweetmeats. It is
this, and nothing more, than this, avowedly; and yet the positivists
would keep for it the earnest language of the Christian, for whom it is
a choice, not between sweetmeats and sweetmeats, but between a
confectioner's wafer and the Host.

It may perhaps be urged by some that, according to this view of it,
purity is degraded into a bitter something, which we only accept
reluctantly, through fear of the consequences of its alternatives. And
it is quite true that a fear of the consequences of wrong love is
inseparably connected with our sense of the value of right love. But
this is a necessity of the case; the quality of the right love is in no
way lowered by it, and it will lead us to consider another important
point.

It is impossible to hold that one thing is incalculably b