“O grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A dreary, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet nor relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.

* * * * *

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And life without an object cannot live._"’

And the foregoing confession is made more significant by the author’s subsequent comment on it. ‘Though my dejection,’ he says, ’honestly looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own.  I felt that the flaw in my life must be a flaw in life itself; and that the question was whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free, and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.  And I felt that unless I could see some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue.’ It is true that in Mill’s case the dejection did not continue; and that in certain ways at which it is not yet time to touch, he succeeded, to his own satisfaction, in finding the end he was thus asking for.  I only quote him to show how necessary he considered such an end to be.  He acknowledged the fact, not only theoretically, or with his lips, but by months of misery, by intermittent thoughts of suicide, and by years of recurring melancholy.  Some ultimate end of action, some kind of satisfying happiness—­this, and this alone, he felt, could give any meaning to work, or make possible any kind of virtue.  And a yet later authority has told us precisely the same thing.  He has told us that the one great question that education is of value for answering, is this very question that was so earnestly asked by Mill. ’The ultimate end of education,’ says Professor Huxley, ’is to promote morality and refinement, by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is the only content, is to be attained not by grovelling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continually striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the highest good—­“a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night."’ And these words are an excellent specimen of the general moral exhortations of the new school.

Now all this is very well as far as it goes; and were there not one thing lacking, it would be just the answer that we are at present so anxious to elicit.  But the one thing lacking, is enough to make it valueless.  It may mean a great deal; but there is no possibility of saying exactly what it means.  Before we can begin to strive towards the ‘highest good,’ we must know something of what this ‘highest