The heading and words in brackets are mine. As the reader may at any time be asked “What are you?” it would be well to be ready with a simple reply.
New truths, old truths! sirs, there is nothing new possible to be revealed to us in the moral world; we know all we shall ever know: and it is for simply reminding us, by their various respective expedients, how we do know this and the other matter, that men get called prophets, poets, and the like. A philosopher’s life is spent in discovering that, of the half-dozen truths he knew when a child, such an one is a lie, as the world states it in set terms; and then, after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of hard-thinking, it becomes a truth again after all, as he happens to newly consider it and view it in a different relation with the others: and so he restates it, to the confusion of somebody else in good time. As for adding to the original stock of truths,—impossible!
R. Browning (A Soul’s Tragedy).
When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, ’twas no matter what he said.
Byron (Don Juan, Canto XI).
The law of equal freedom which Herbert Spencer deduces is binding only upon those who admit both that human happiness is the Divine Will and that we should act in accordance with the Divine Will. Why should I obey this law? Because without such obedience human happiness cannot be complete. Why should I aim at human happiness? Because human happiness is the Divine Will. The inexorable why pursues us here—Why should I aim at the fulfilment of the Divine Will? To this question there seems no satisfactory reply but that it is for my own happiness to do so.