And that system, as I have said before, professes to be essentially a moral one, in the old religious sense of the word.  It retains the old ethical vocabulary; and lays the same intense stress on the old ethical distinctions.  Nor is this a mere profession only.  We shall see that the system logically requires it.  One of its chief virtues—­indeed the only virtue in it we have defined hitherto—­is, as has been seen, an habitual self-denial.  But a denial of what?  Of something, plainly, that if denied to ourselves, can be conveyed as a negative or positive good to others.  But the good things that are thus transferable cannot plainly be the ‘highest good,’ or morality would consist largely of a surrender of its own end.  This end must evidently be something inward and inalienable, just as the religious end was.  It is a certain inward state of the heart, and of the heart’s affections.  For this inward state to be fully produced, and maintained generally, a certain sufficiency of material well-being may be requisite; but without this inward state such sufficiency will be morally valueless.  Day by day we must of course have our daily bread.  But the positivists must maintain, just as the Christians did, that man does not live by bread alone; and that his life does not consist in the abundance of the things that he possesses.  And thus when they are brought face to face with the matter, we find them all, with one consent, condemning as false the same allurements that were condemned by Christianity; and pointing, as it did, to some other treasure that will not wax old—­some water, the man who drinks of which will never thirst more.

Now what is this treasure—­this inward state of the heart?  What is its analysis, and why is it so precious?  As yet we are quite in the dark as to this.  No positive moralist has as yet shown us, in any satisfactory way, either of these things.  This statement, I know, will be contradicted by many; and, until it is explained further, it is only natural that it should be.  It will be said that a positive human happiness of just the kind needed has been put before the world again and again; and not only put before it, but earnestly followed and reverently enjoyed by many.  Have not truth, benevolence, purity, and, above all, pure affection, been, to many, positive ends of action for their own sakes, without any thought, as Dr. Tyndall says, ’of any reward or punishment looming in the future’?  Is not virtue followed in the noblest way, when its followers, if asked what reward they look for, can say to it, as Thomas Aquinas said to Christ, ’Nil nisi te, Domine’?  And has not it so been followed? and is not the positivist position, to a large extent at any rate, proved?

Is it not true, as has been said by a recent writer, that[11] ’lives nourished, and invigorated by [a purely human] ideal have been, and still may be, seen amongst us, and the appearance of but a single example proves the adequacy of the belief?’