have but to remember that a belief that was supposed to rest on an
equally wide basis--the belief in God, and in a supernatural order--has
in these days, not been questioned only, but has been to a great degree,
successfully annihilated. The only philosophy that belongs to the
present age, the only philosophy that is a really new agent in progress,
has declared this belief to be a dissolving dream of the past. And this
belief, as we shall see presently, is, amongst civilized men at least,
far older than the belief in life; it has been far more widely spread,
and experience has been held to confirm it with an equal certainty. If
this then is inevitably disintegrated by the action of a widening
knowledge, it cannot be taken for granted that the belief in life will
not fare likewise. It may do so; but until we have examined it more
closely we cannot be certain that it will. Common consent and
experience, until they are analysed, are fallacious tests for the
seekers after positive truth. The emotions may forbid us to ask our
question; but in modern philosophy the emotions play no part as organs
of discovery. They are facts in themselves, and as such are of course of
value; but they point to no facts beyond themselves. That men loved God
and felt his presence close to them proves nothing, to the positive
thinker, as to God's existence. Nor will the mere emotion of reverence
towards life necessarily go any farther towards proving that it deserves
reverence. It is distinctly asserted by the modern school that the right
state in which to approach everything is a state of enlightened
scepticism. We are to consider everything doubtful, until it is proved
certain, or unless, from its very nature, it is not possible to doubt
it.

Nor is this all; for, apart from these modern canons, the question of
life's worth has, as a matter of fact, been always recognised as in a
certain sense an open one. The greatest intellects of the world, in all