its pains, will have effected nothing. They will all have faded like an
unsubstantial pageant, and not left a wrack behind.

Here, then, the importance of morality at once changes both its
dimensions and its kind. It is confined within narrow limitations of
space and time. It is no longer a thing we can talk vaguely about, or
to which any sounding but indefinite phrases will be applicable. We can
no longer say either to the individual or the race,

_Choose well, and your choice is
Brief, but yet endless._[14]

We can only say that it is brief, and that bye and bye what it was will
be no matter to anyone.

Still within these limits it may be said, certainly, that it is a great
thing for us that we should be happy; and if it be true that the moral
end brings the greatest happiness, then it is man's greatest achievement
to attain to the moral end. But when we say that the greatest happiness
resides in the moral end, we must be careful to see what it is we mean.
We may mean that as a matter of fact men generally give a full assent to
this, and act accordingly, which is the most obvious falsehood that
could be uttered on any subject; or we may mean--indeed, if we mean
anything we must mean--that they would give a full assent, and act
accordingly, could their present state of mind undergo a complete
change, and their eyes be opened, which at present are fast closed. But
according to the positivist theory, this hypothesis is in most cases an
impossibility. The moral end, as we have seen, is an inward state of the
heart; and the heart, on the showing of the positivists, is for each
man an absolute solitude. No one can gain admission to it but by his