either by diffidence or by personal feeling; and the positive school, though they rejoice to question everything else, have, at least in this country, left the worth of life alone.  They may now and then, perhaps, have affected to examine it; but their examination has been merely formal, like that of a customs-house officer, who passes a portmanteau, which he has only opened.  They have been as tender with it as Don Quixote was with his mended helmet, when he would not put his card-paper vizor to the test of the steel sword.  I propose to supply this deficiency in their investigations.  I propose to apply exact thought to the only great subject to which it has not been applied already.

To numbers, as I have just said, this will of course seem useless.  They will think that the question never really was an open one; or that, if it ever were so, the common sense of mankind has long ago finally settled it.  To ask it again, they will think idle, or worse than idle.  It will express to them, if it expresses anything, no perplexity of the intellect, but merely some vague disease of the feelings.  They will say that it is but the old ejaculation of satiety or despair, as old as human nature itself; it is a kind of maundering common to all moral dyspepsia; they have often heard it before, and they wish they may never hear it again.

But let them be a little less impatient.  Let them look at the question closer, and more calmly; and it will not be long before its import begins to change for them.  They will see that though it may have often been asked idly, it is yet capable of a meaning that is very far from idle; and that however old they may think it, yet as asked by our generation it is really completely new—­that it bears a meaning which is indeed not far from any one of them, but which is practical and pressing—­I might almost say portentous—­and which is something literally unexampled in the past history of mankind.

I am aware that this position is not only not at first sight obvious, but that, even when better understood, it will probably be called false.  My first care, therefore, will be to explain it at length, and clearly.  For this purpose we must consider two points in order; first, what is the exact doubt we intend to express by our question; and next, why in our day this doubt should have such a special and fresh significance.

Let us then make it quite plain, at starting, that when we ask ’Is life worth living?’ we are not asking whether its balance of pains is necessarily and always in excess of its balance of pleasures.  We are not asking whether any one has been, or whether any one is happy.  To the unjaundiced eye nothing is more clear than that happiness of various kinds has been, and is, continually attained by men.  And ingenious pessimists do but waste their labour when they try to convince a happy man that he really must be miserable.  What I am going to discuss is not the superfluous truism that life has been found