Thus theism, whether it be true or no, can give a logical and a full account of the supposed nature of the moral end, and of its supposed importance.  Let us turn now to positivism, and consider what is its position.  The positivist, we must remember, conceives of the moral end in the same way, and sets upon it the same value.  Let us see how far his own premisses will give him any support in this.  These premisses, so far as they differ from those of theism, consist of two great denials:  there is no personal God, and there is no personal immortality.  We will glance rapidly at the direct results of these.

In the first place, they confine all the life with which we can have the least moral connection to the surface of this earth, and to the limited time for which life and consciousness can exist upon it.  They isolate the moral law, as I shall show more clearly hereafter, from any law or force in the universe that may be wider and more permanent.  When the individual dies, he can only be said to live by metaphor, in the results of his outward actions.  When the race dies, in no thinkable way can we say that it will live at all.  Everything will then be as though it never had been.  Whatever humanity may have done before its end arrives, however high it may have raised itself, however low it may have sunk itself,

              The event
    Will trammel up the consequence, and catch
    With its success surcease.

All the vice of the world, and all its virtue, all its pleasures and all its pains, will have effected nothing.  They will all have faded like an unsubstantial pageant, and not left a wrack behind.

Here, then, the importance of morality at once changes both its dimensions and its kind.  It is confined within narrow limitations of space and time.  It is no longer a thing we can talk vaguely about, or to which any sounding but indefinite phrases will be applicable.  We can no longer say either to the individual or the race,

    Choose well, and your choice is
    Brief, but yet endless.[14]

We can only say that it is brief, and that bye and bye what it was will be no matter to anyone.

Still within these limits it may be said, certainly, that it is a great thing for us that we should be happy; and if it be true that the moral end brings the greatest happiness, then it is man’s greatest achievement to attain to the moral end.  But when we say that the greatest happiness resides in the moral end, we must be careful to see what it is we mean.  We may mean that as a matter of fact men generally give a full assent to this, and act accordingly, which is the most obvious falsehood that could be uttered on any subject; or we may mean—­indeed, if we mean anything we must mean—­that they would give a full assent, and act accordingly, could their present state of mind undergo a complete change, and their eyes be opened, which at present are fast closed.  But according to the positivist theory, this hypothesis is in most cases an impossibility.  The moral end, as we have seen, is an inward state of the heart; and the heart, on the showing of the positivists, is for each man an absolute solitude.  No one can gain admission to it but by his assistance; and to the larger part no one can ever gain admission at all.