worth living by many; but the profoundly different proposition that it ought to be found worth living by all.  For this is what life is pronounced to be, when those claims are made for it that at present universally are made; when, as a general truth, it is said to be worth living; or when any of those august epithets are applied to it that are at present applied so constantly.  At present, as we all know, it is called sacred, solemn, earnest, significant, and so forth.  To withhold such epithets is considered a kind of blasphemy.  And the meaning of all such language is this:  it means that life has some deep inherent worth of its own, beyond what it can acquire or lose by the caprice of circumstance—­a worth, which though it may be most fully revealed to a man, through certain forms of success, is yet not destroyed or made a minus quantity by failure.  Certain forms of love, for instance, are held in a special way to reveal this worth to us; but the worth that a successful love is thus supposed to reveal is a worth that a hopeless love is supposed not to destroy.  The worth is a part of life’s essence, not a mere chance accident, as health or riches are; and we are supposed to lose it by no acts but our own.

Now it is evident that such a worth as this, is, in one sense, no mere fancy.  Numbers actually have found it; and numbers actually still continue to find it.  The question is not whether the worth exists, but on what is the worth based.  How far is the treasure incorruptible; and how far will our increasing knowledge act as moth and rust to it?  There are some things whose value is completely established by the mere fact that men do value them.  They appeal to single tastes, they defy further analysis, and they thus form, as it were, the bases of all pleasures and happiness.  But these are few in number; they are hardly ever met with in a perfectly pure state; and their effect, when they are so met, is either momentary, or far from vivid.  As a rule they are found in combinations of great complexity, fused into an infinity of new substances by the action of beliefs and associations; and these two agents are often of more importance in the result than are the things they act upon.  Take for instance a boy at Eton or Oxford, who affects a taste in wine.  Give him a bottle of gooseberry champagne; tell him it is of the finest brand, and that it cost two hundred shillings a dozen.  He will sniff, and wink at it in ecstasy; he will sip it slowly with an air of knowing reverence; and his enjoyment of it probably will be far keener, than it would be, were the wine really all he fancies it, and he had lived years enough to have come to discern its qualities.  Here the part played by belief and associations is of course evident.  The boy’s enjoyment is real, and it rests to a certain extent on a foundation of solid fact; the taste of the gooseberry champagne is an actual pleasure to his palate.  Anything nauseous, black dose for instance, could never raise him to the state