of delight in question.  But this simple pleasure of sense is but a small part of the pleasure he actually experiences.  That pleasure, as a whole, is a highly complex thing, and rests mainly on a basis that, by a little knowledge, could be annihilated in a moment.  Tell the boy what the champagne really is, he has been praising; and the state of his mind and face will undergo a curious transformation.  Our sense of the worth of life is similar in its complexity to the boy’s sense of the worth of his wine.  Beliefs and associations play exactly the same part in it.  The beliefs in this last case may of course be truer.  The question that I have to ask is, are they?  In some individual cases certainly, they have not been.  Miss Harriet Martineau, for instance, judging life from her own experience of it, was quite persuaded that it was a most solemn and satisfactory thing, and she has told the world as much, in no hesitating manner.  But a part at least of the solemn satisfaction she felt in it was due to a grotesque over-estimate of her own social and intellectual importance.  Here, then, was a worth in life, real enough to the person who found it, but which a little knowledge of the world would have at once taken away from her.  Does the general reverence with which life is at present regarded rest in any degree upon any similar misconception?  And if so, to what extent does it?  Will it fall to pieces before the breath of a larger knowledge? or has it that firm foundation in fact that will enable it to survive in spite of all enlightenment, and perhaps even to increase in consequence of it?

Such is the outline of the question I propose to deal with.  I will now show why it is so pressing, and why, in the present crisis of thought, it is so needful that it should be dealt with.  The first impression it produces, as I have said, is that it is superfluous.  Our belief in life seems to rest on too wide an experience for us to entertain any genuine doubt of the truth of it.  But this first impression does not go for much.  It is a mere superficial thing, and will wear off immediately.  We have but to remember that a belief that was supposed to rest on an equally wide basis—­the belief in God, and in a supernatural order—­has in these days, not been questioned only, but has been to a great degree, successfully annihilated.  The only philosophy that belongs to the present age, the only philosophy that is a really new agent in progress, has declared this belief to be a dissolving dream of the past.  And this belief, as we shall see presently, is, amongst civilized men at least, far older than the belief in life; it has been far more widely spread, and experience has been held to confirm it with an equal certainty.  If this then is inevitably disintegrated by the action of a widening knowledge, it cannot be taken for granted that the belief in life will not fare likewise.  It may do so; but until we have examined it more closely we cannot be certain that