is the implicit teaching of all George Eliot's novels; whilst Professor
Huxley tells us that come what may to our '_intellectual beliefs and
even education_,' '_the beauty of holiness and the ugliness of sin_'
will remain for those that have eyes to see them, '_no mere metaphors,
but real and intense feelings_.' These are but a few examples, but the
view of life they illustrate is so well known that these few will
suffice. The point on which the modern positivist school is most
vehement, is that it does not destroy, but that on the contrary it
intensifies, the distinction between right and wrong.

And now let us consider what, according to all positive theories, this
supremacy of morality means. It means that there is a certain course of
active life, and a certain course only, by which life can be made by
everyone a beautiful and a noble thing: and life is called earnest,
because such a prize is within our reach, and solemn because there is a
risk that we may fail to reach it. Were this not so, right and wrong
could have no general and objective meaning. They would be purely
personal matters--mere misleading names, in fact, for the private likes
and the dislikes of each of us; and to talk of right, and good, and
morality, as things that we ought all to conform to, and to live by,
would be simply to talk nonsense. What the very existence of a moral
system implies is, that whatever may be our personal inclinations
naturally, there is some common pattern to which they should be all
adjusted; the reason being that we shall so all become partakers in some
common happiness, which is greater beyond comparison than every other
kind.

Here we are presented with two obvious tasks: the first, to enquire what
this happiness is, what are the qualities and attractions generally
ascribed to it; the second, to analyse it, as it is thus held up to us,