morality are strong enough to hold their own, without supernatural aid; and when we look to see on what ground he holds they are, we find it to consist in the following explanation that one is. ‘Given,’ he says, ’a society of human beings under certain circumstances, and the question whether a particular action on the part of one of its members will tend to increase the general happiness or not, is a question of natural knowledge, and as such is a perfectly legitimate subject of scientific inquiry....  If it can be shown by observation or experiment, that theft, murder, and adultery do not tend to diminish the happiness of society, then, in the absence of any but natural knowledge, they are not social immoralities.’

Now, in the above passage we have at least one thing.  We have a short epitome of one of those classes of answers that our positive moralists are offering us.  It is with this class that I shall deal in the following chapter; and point out as briefly as may be its complete irrelevance.  After that, I shall go on to the other.

FOOTNOTES: 

[8] Vide Nineteenth Century, No. 3, pp. 536, 537.

CHAPTER III.

SOCIOLOGY AS THE FOUNDATION OF MORALITY.

Society, says Professor Clifford, is the highest of all organisms;[9] and its organic nature, he tells us, is one of those great facts which our own generation has been the first to state rationally.  It is our understanding of this that enables us to supply morals with a positive basis.  It is, he proceeds, because society is organic, ’that actions which, as individual, are insignificant, are massed together into ... important movements.  Co-operation or band-work is the life of it.’  And ‘it is the practice of band-work,’ he adds, that, unknown till lately though its nature was to us, has so moulded man as ’to create in him two specially human faculties, the conscience and the intellect;’ of which the former, we are told, gives us the desire for the good, and the latter instructs us how to attain this desire by action.  So too Professor Huxley, once more to recur to him, says that that state of man would be ’a true civitas Dei, in which each man’s moral faculty shall be such as leads him to control all those desires which run counter to the good of mankind.’  And J.S.  Mill, whose doubts as to the value of life we have already dwelt upon, professed to have at last satisfied himself by a precisely similar answer.  He had never ’wavered in the conviction,’ he tells us, even all through his perplexity, that, if life had any value at all, ‘happiness’ was its one ‘end,’ and the ‘test of its rule of conduct;’ but he now thought that this end was to be attained by not making it the direct end, but ’by fixing the mind on some object other than one’s own happiness; on