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 must first see in general, how much is at
present dependent on it.

This might at first sight seem a hard task to perform; the interests we
shall have to deal with are so many and so various. But the difficulty
may be eluded. I have already gone to literature for examples of special
feelings on the part of individuals, and under certain circumstances.
We will now go to it for a kindred, though not for the same assistance;
and for this end we shall approach it in a slightly different way. What
we did before was this. We took certain works of literary art, and
selecting, as it were, one or two special patches of colour, we analysed
the composition of these. What we shall now do will be to take the
pictures as organic wholes, with a view to analysing the effect of them
as pictures--the harmony or the contrast of their colours, and the
massing of their lights and shadows. If we reflect for a moment what art