rom era to
era._--Froude's _History of England_, ch. i.

What I am about to deal with in this book is a question which may well
strike many, at first sight, as a question that has no serious meaning,
or none at any rate for the sane and healthy mind. I am about to attempt
inquiring, not sentimentally, but with all calmness and sobriety, into
the true value of this human life of ours, as tried by those tests of
reality which the modern world is accepting, and to ask dispassionately
if it be really worth the living. The inquiry certainly has often been
made before; but it has never been made properly; it has never been made
in the true scientific spirit. It has always been vitiated either by
diffidence or by personal feeling; and the positive school, though they
rejoice to question everything else, have, at least in this country,
left the worth of life alone. They may now and then, perhaps, have
affected to examine it; but their examination has been merely formal,
like that of a customs-house officer, who passes a portmanteau, which he
has only opened. They have been as tender with it as Don Quixote was
with his mended helmet, when he would not put his card-paper vizor to
the test of the steel sword. I propose to supply this deficiency in
their investigations. I propose to apply exact thought to the only great
subject to which it has not been applied already.

To numbers, as I have just said, this will of course seem useless. They
will think that the question never really was an open one; or that, if
it ever were so, the common sense of mankind has long ago finally
settled it. To ask it again, they will think idle, or worse than idle.
It will express to them, if it expresses anything, no perplexity of the
intellect, but merely some vague disease of the feelings. They will say
that it is but the old ejaculation of satiety or despair, as old as
human nature itself; it is a kind of maundering common to all moral
dyspepsia; they have often heard it before, and they wish they may never
hear it again.

But let them be a little less impatient. Let them look at the question
closer, and more calmly; and it will not be long before its import
begins to change for them. They will see that though it may have often
been asked idly, it is yet capable of a meaning that is very far from
idle; and that however old they may think it, yet as asked by our
generation it is really completely new--that it bears a meaning which is
indeed