it was too directly before our eyes.  At all events, wherever it is let it be pointed out to us.  It is useless, as we have seen, if not generally presentable.  To those who most need it, it is useless until presented.  Indeed, until it is presented we are but acting on the maxim of its advocates by refusing to believe in its existence. ‘No simplicity of mind,’ says Professor Clifford, ’no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.’

The question, then, that we want answered has by this time, I think, been stated with sufficient clearness, and its importance and its legitimacy been placed beyond a doubt.  I shall now go on to explain in detail how completely unsatisfactory are the answers that are at present given it; how it is evaded by some and begged by others; and how those that are most plausible are really made worthless, by a subtle but profound defect.

These answers divide themselves into two classes, which, though invariably confused by those that give them, are in reality quite distinct and separable.  Professor Huxley, one of the most vigorous of our positive thinkers, shall help us to understand these.  He is going to tell us, let us remember, about the ’highest good’—­the happiness, in other words, that we have just been discussing—­the secret of our life’s worth, and the test of all our conduct.  This happiness he divides into two kinds.[8] He says that there are two things that we may mean when we speak about it.  We may mean the happiness of a society of men, or we may mean the happiness of the members of that society.  And when we speak of morality, we may mean two things also; and these two things must be kept distinct.  We may mean what Professor Huxley calls ‘social morality,’ and of this the test and object is the happiness of societies; or we may mean what he calls ‘personal morality,’ and of this the test and object is the happiness of individuals.  And the answers which our positive moralists make to us divide themselves into two classes, according to the sort of happiness they refer to.

It is before all things important that this division be understood, and be kept quite clear in our minds, if we would see honestly what our positive modern systems amount to.  For what makes them at present so very hard to deal with, is the fact that their exponents are perpetually perplexing themselves between these two classes of answers, first giving one, and then the other, and imagining that, by a kind of confusion of substance, they can both afford solutions of the same questions.  Thus they continually speak of life as though its crowning achievement were some kind of personal happiness; and then being asked to explain the nature and basis of this, they at once shift their ground, and talk to us of the laws and conditions of social happiness.  Professor Huxley will again supply us with a very excellent example.  He starts with the thesis that both sorts of