CHAPTER VI.

LIFE AS ITS OWN REWARD.

    ‘If in this life only we have hope—­’

What we have now before us is a certain subtraction sum.  We have to take from life one of its strongest present elements; and see as well as we can what will then be the remainder.  An exact answer we shall, of course, not expect; but we can arrive at an approximate one without much difficulty.

What we have to subtract has been shown in the previous chapter; but it may again be described briefly in the following way.  Life in its present state, as we have just seen, is a union of two sets of feelings, and of two kinds of happiness, and is partly the sum of the two, and partly a compromise between them.  Its resources, by one classification, are separable into two groups, according as in themselves they chance to repel or please us; and the most obvious measure of happiness would seem to be nothing more than our gain of what is thus pleasant, and our shirking of what is thus painful.  But if we examine life as it actually exists about us, we shall see that this classification has been traversed by another.  Many things naturally repellent have received a supernatural blessing; many things naturally pleasant have received a supernatural curse; and thus our highest happiness is often composed of pain, and our profoundest misery is nearly always based on pleasure.  Accordingly, whereas happiness naturally would seem the test of right, right has come supernaturally to be the test of happiness.  And so completely is this notion engrained in the world’s consciousness, that in all our deeper views of life, no matter whether we be saints or sinners, right and wrong are the things that first appeal to us, not happiness and misery.  A certain supernatural moral judgment, in fact, has become a primary faculty with us, and it mixes with every estimate we form of the world around us.

It is this faculty that positivism, if accepted fully, must either destroy or paralyse; it is this, therefore, that in imagination we must now try to eliminate.  To do this—­to see what will be left in life to us, without this faculty, we must first see in general, how much is at present dependent on it.

This might at first sight seem a hard task to perform; the interests we shall have to deal with are so many and so various.  But the difficulty may be eluded.  I have already gone to literature for examples of special feelings on the part of individuals, and under certain circumstances.  We will now go to it for a kindred, though not for the same assistance; and for this end we shall approach it in a slightly different way.  What we did before was this.  We took certain works of literary art, and selecting, as it were, one or two special patches of colour, we analysed the composition of these.  What we shall now do will be to take the pictures as organic wholes, with a view to analysing the effect of them as pictures—­the