great doctrine of verification.  They apply it rigorously to one set of facts, and then utterly fail to see that it is equally applicable to another.  They apply it to religion, and declare that the dogmas of religion are dreams; but when they pass from the dogmas of religion to those of morality, they not only do not use their test, but unconsciously they denounce it with the utmost vehemence.  Thus Mr. Leslie Stephen, in the very essay from which I have just now quoted, not only has recourse, for giving weight to his arguments, to such ethical epithets as low, lofty, and even sacred, but he puts forward as his own motive for speaking, a belief which on his own showing is a dream.  That motive, he says, is devotion to truth for its own sake—­the only principle that is really worthy of man.  His argument is simply this.  It is man’s holiest and most important duty to discover the truth at all costs, and the one test of truth is physical verification.  Here he tells us we find the only high morality, and the men who cling to religious dream-dogmas which they cannot physically verify, can only answer their opponents, says Mr. Stephen, ‘by a shriek or a sneer.’ ‘The sentiment,’ he proceeds, ’which the dreamer most thoroughly hates and misunderstands, is the love of truth for its own sake.  He cannot conceive why a man should attack a lie simply because it is a lie.’ Mr. Stephen is wrong.  That is exactly what the dreamer can do, and no one else but he; and Mr. Stephen is himself a dreamer when he writes and feels like this.  Why, let me ask him, should the truth be loved?  Do the ‘perceptions,’ which are for him the only valid guides, tell him so?  The perceptions tell him, as he expressly says, that the truths of nature, so far as man is concerned with them, are ‘harsh’ truths.  Why should ‘harsh’ things be loveable?  Or supposing Mr. Stephen does love them, why is that love ‘lofty’? and why should he so brusquely command all other men to share it? Low and lofty—­what has Mr. Stephen to do with words like these?  They are part of the language of dreamland, not of real life.  Mr. Stephen has no right to them.  If he has, he must be able to draw a hard and fast line between them; for if his conceptions of them be ‘vague in outline’ and ‘unsubstantial,’ they belong by his own express definition to the land of dreams.  But this is what Mr. Stephen, with the solemn imbecility of his school, is quite incapable of seeing.  Professor Huxley is in exactly the same case.  He says, as we have seen already, that, come what may of it, our highest morality is to follow truth; that the ’lowest depth of immorality’ is to pretend to believe what we see no reason for believing;’ and that our only proper reasons for belief are some physical, some perceptible evidence.  And yet at the same time he says that to ‘attempt to upset morality’ by the help of the physical sciences is about as rational