fade out of the human consciousness the things I have before dwelt on—­all capacity for the keener pains and pleasures, but there will fade out of it also that strange sense which is the union of all these—­the white light woven of all these rays; that is, the vague but deep sense of some special dignity in ourselves—­a sense which we feel to be our birthright, inalienable except by our own act and deed; a sense which, at present, in success sobers us, and in failure sustains us, and which is visible more or less distinctly in our manners, in our bearing, and even in the very expression of the human countenance:  it is, in other words, the sense that life is worth living, not accidentally but essentially.  And as this sense goes its place will be taken by one precisely opposite—­the sense that life, in so far as it is worth living at all, is worth living not essentially, but accidentally; that it depends entirely upon what of its pleasures we can each one of us realise; that it will vary as a positive quantity, like wealth, and that it may become also a various quantity, like poverty; and that behind and beyond these vicissitudes it can have no abiding value.

To realise fully a state of things like this is for us not possible.  But we can, however, understand something of its nature.  I conceive those to be altogether wrong who say that such a state would be one of any wild license, or anything that we should call very revolting depravity.  Offences, certainly, that we consider the most abominable would doubtless be committed continually and as matters of course.  Such a feeling as shame about them would be altogether unknown.  But the normal forms of passion would remain, I conceive, the most important; and it is probable, that though no form of vice would have the least anathema attached to it, the rage for the sexual pleasures would be far less fierce than it is in many cases now.  The sort of condition to which the world would be tending would be a condition rather of dulness than what we, in our parlance, should now call degradation.  Indeed the state of things to which the positive view of life seems to promise us, and which to some extent it is actually now bringing on us, is exactly what was predicted long ago, with an accuracy that seems little less than inspired, at the end of Pope’s Dunciad.

In vain, in vain:  the all-composing hour Resistless falls! the muse obeys the power.  She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold Of night primaeval and of chaos old.  Before her, fancy’s gilded clouds decay, And all its varying rainbows die away.  Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.  As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain, The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain; As Argus’ eyes, by Hermes’ wand oppress’d Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest; Thus, at her felt approach and secret might, Art after art goes out, and all is night.  See skulking truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry