223.

[18] _Ibid._, p. 225.

[19] _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, p. 222.

[20] _Ibid._, p. 211.

[21] Dante Gabriel Rosetti.

[22] Aug. Conf., lib. ix. In the earlier part of the passage the extreme
redundancy of the original has been curtailed somewhat. In the rendering
here given I have to a great extent followed Dr. Pusey.

CHAPTER VI.

LIFE AS ITS OWN REWARD.

'_If in this life only we have hope_--'

What we have now before us is a certain subtraction sum. We have to take
from life one of its strongest present elements; and see as well as we
can what will then be the remainder. An exact answer we shall, of
course, not expect; but we can arrive at an approximate one without much
difficulty.

What we have to subtract has been shown in the previous chapter; but it
may again be described briefly in the following way. Life in its present
state, as we have just seen, is a union of two sets of feelings, and of
two kinds of happiness, and is partly the sum of the two, and partly a
compromise between them. Its resources, by one classification, are
separable into two groups, according as in themselves they chance to
repel or please us; and the most obvious measure of happiness would seem
to be nothing more than our gain of what is thus pleasant, and our
shirking of what is thus painful. But if we examine life as it actually
exists about us, we shall see that this classification has been
traversed by another. Many things naturally repellent have received a
supernatural blessing; many things naturally pleasant have received a
supernatural curse; and thus our highest happiness is often composed of
pain, and our profoundest misery is nearly always based on pleasure.
Accordingly, whereas happiness naturally would seem the test of right,
right has come supernaturally to be the test of happiness. And so
completely is this notion engrained in the world's consciousness, that
in all our deeper views of life, no matter whether we be saints or
sinners, right and wrong are the things that first appeal to us, not
happiness and misery. A certain supernatural moral judgment, in fact,
has become a primary faculty with us, and it mixes with every estimate
we form of the world around us.

It is this faculty that positivism, if accepted fully, must either
destroy or paralyse; it is this, therefore, that in imagination we must
now try to eliminate. To do this--to see what will be left in life to
us, without this faculty, we