But the general good by which these actions are tested is something quite distinct from happiness, though it undoubtedly has a close connection with it.  It is no kind of happiness, high or low, in particular; it is simply those negative conditions required equally by every kind.  If we are to be happy in any way, no matter what, we must of course have our lives, and, next to our lives, our health and our possessions secured to us.  But to secure us these does not secure us happiness.  It simply leaves us free to secure it, if we can, for ourselves.  Once let us have some common agreement as to what this happiness is, we may then be able to formulate other rules for attaining it.  But in the absence of any such agreement, the only possible aim of social morality, the only possible meaning of the general good, is not any kind or any kinds of happiness, but the security of those conditions without which all happiness would be impossible.

Suppose the human race were a set of canaries in a cage, and that we were in grave doubt as to what seed to give them—­hemp-seed, rape-seed, or canary-seed, or all three mixed in certain proportions.  That would exactly represent the state of our case thus far.  There is the question that we want the positive school to answer.  It is surely evident that, in this perplexity, it is beside the point to tell us that the birds must not peck each other’s eyes out, and that they must all have access to the trough that we are ignorant how to fill.

The fault then, so continually committed by the positive school, is this.  They confuse the negative conditions of happiness with the positive materials of it.  Professor Huxley, in a passage I have already quoted, is caught, so to speak, in the very act of committing it. ‘Theft, murder, and adultery,’ all these three, it will be remembered, he classes together, and seems to think that they stand upon the same footing.  But from what has just been pointed out, it is plain that they do not do so.  We condemn theft and murder for one reason.  We condemn adultery for quite another.  We condemn the former because they are incompatible with any form of happiness.  We condemn the latter because it is the supposed destruction of one particular form; or the substitution, rather, of a form supposed to be less complete, for another form supposed to be more complete.  If the ‘highest good,’ if the best kind of happiness, be the end we are in search of, the truths of sociology will help us but a very short way towards it.  By the practice of ‘band-work’ alone we shall never learn to construct a ‘true Civitas Dei.’  Band-work with the same perfection may be practised for opposite ends.  Send an army in a just war or an unjust one, in either case it will need the same discipline.  There must be order amongst thieves, as well as amongst honest men.  There can be an orderly brothel as well as an orderly nunnery, and all order rests on co-operation.  We presume co-operation.  We require an end for which to co-operate.