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.
Thus in the seas of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal myriads live alone.
So says Mr. Matthew Arnold; and the gentle Keble utters the same sentiment, remarking, with a delicate pathos, how seldom those even who have known us best and longest
Know half the reason why we smile or sigh.
Thus in the recesses of his own soul each man is, for the positivist, as much alone as if he were the only conscious thing in the universe; and his whole inner life, when he dies, will, to use some words of George Eliot's that I have already quoted,
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb,
Unread for ever.