a worth as this, is, in one sense, no mere
fancy. Numbers actually have found it; and numbers actually still
continue to find it. The question is not whether the worth exists, but
on what is the worth based. How far is the treasure incorruptible; and
how far will our increasing knowledge act as moth and rust to it? There
are some things whose value is completely established by the mere fact
that men do value them. They appeal to single tastes, they defy further
analysis, and they thus form, as it were, the _bases_ of all pleasures
and happiness. But these are few in number; they are hardly ever met
with in a perfectly pure state; and their effect, when they are so met,
is either momentary, or far from vivid. As a rule they are found in
combinations of great complexity, fused into an infinity of new
substances by the action of beliefs and associations; and these two
agents are often of more importance in the result than are the things
they act upon. Take for instance a boy at Eton or Oxford, who affects a
taste in wine. Give him a bottle of gooseberry champagne; tell him it is
of the finest brand, and that it cost two hundred shillings a dozen. He
will sniff, and wink at it in ecstasy; he will sip it slowly with an air
of knowing reverence; and his enjoyment of it probably will be far
keener, than it would be, were the wine really all he fancies it, and he
had lived years enough to have come to discern its qualities. Here the
part played by belief and associations is of course evident. The boy's
enjoyment is real, and it rests to a certain extent on a foundation of
solid fact; the taste of the gooseberry champagne is an actual pleasure
to his palate. Anything nauseous, black dose for instance, could never
raise him to the state of delight in question. But this simple pleasure
of sense is but a small part of the pleasure he actually experiences.
That pleasure, as a whole, is a highly complex thing, and rests mainly
on a basis that, by a little knowledge, could be annihilated in a
moment. Tell the boy what the champagne really is, he has been praising;
and the state of his mind and face will undergo a curious
transformation. Our sense of the worth of life is similar in its
complexity to the boy's sense of the worth of his wine. Beliefs and
associations play exactly the same part in it. The beliefs in this last
case may of course be truer. The question that I have to ask is, are
they? In some individual cases certainly, they