Now by a simple substitution of terms, such language as this will reveal at once one important fact to us.  According to the avowed principles of positive morality, morality has no other test but happiness.  Immorality, therefore, can have no conceivable meaning but unhappiness, or at least the means to it, which in this case are hardly distinguishable from the end; and thus, according to the above rigid reasoners, the human race will not have reached the lowest depths of misery so long as it rejects the one thing which ex hypothesi might render it less miserable.  Either then all this talk about truth must really be so much irrelevant nonsense, or else, if it be not nonsense, the test of conduct is something distinct from happiness.  The question before us is a plain one, which may be answered in one of two ways, but which positivism cannot possibly answer in both.  Is truth to be sought only because it conduces to happiness, or is happiness only to be sought for when it is based on truth?  In the latter case truth, not happiness, is the test of conduct.  Are our positive moralists prepared to admit this?  If so, let them explicitly and consistently say so.  Let them keep this test and reject the other, for the two cannot be fused together.

    [Greek:  oxos t’ aleipha t’ egcheas tauto kutei
    dichostatount an ou philoin prosennepois.]

This inconsistency is here, however, only a side point—­a passing illustration of the slovenliness of the positivist logic.  As far as my present argument goes, we may let this pass altogether, and allow the joint existence of these mutually exclusive ends.  What I am about to do is to show that on positive grounds the last of these is more hopelessly inadequate than the first—­that truth as a moral end has even more of religion in its composition than happiness, and that when this religion goes, its value will even more hopelessly evaporate.

At first sight this may seem impossible.  The devotion to truth may seem as simple as it is sacred.  But if we consider the matter further, we shall soon think differently.  To begin then; truth, as the positivists speak of it, is plainly a thing that is to be worshipped in two ways—­firstly by its discovery, and secondly by its publication.  Thus Professor Huxley, however much it may pain him, will not hide from himself the fact that there is no God; and however bad this knowledge may be for humanity, his highest and most sacred duty still consists in imparting it.  Now why should this be?  I ask.  Is it simply because the fact in question is the truth?  That surely cannot be so, as a few other examples will show us.  A man discovers that his wife has been seduced by his best friend.  Is there anything very high or very sacred in that discovery?  Having made it, does he feel any consolation in the knowledge that it is the entire truth?  And will the ‘gladness of true heroism’ visit him if he proclaims it to everyone in his club?