[11] Vide _Pessimism_, by James Sully. [12] Professor Clifford; 'Ethics of Belief,' _Contemporary Review_, Jan. 1877. [13] '_An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create a world in which posterity will live!_'--Professor Clifford. [14] Goethe, translated by Carlyle. CHAPTER V. LOVE AS A TEST OF GOODNESS. [Greek: Erota de, ton tyrannon andron, Ton tas Aphroditas Philtaton thalamon Kledouchon, ou sebizomen, Perthonta.]--_Euripides._ I will again re-state, in other words than my own, the theory we are now going to test by the actual facts of life. '_The assertion_,' says Professor Huxley, '_that morality is in any way dependent on certain philosophical problems, produces the same effect on my mind as if one should say that a man's vision depends on his theory of sight, or that he has no business to be sure that ginger is hot in his mouth, unless he has formed definite views as to the nature of ginger_.' Or, to put the matter in slightly different language, the sorts of happiness, we are told, that are secured to us by moral conduct are facts, so far as regards our own consciousness of them, as simple, as constant and as universal, as is the perception of the outer world secured to us by our eyesight, or as the sensation formed on the palate by the application of ginger to it. Love, for instance, according to this view, is as simple a delight for men in its highest forms as it is for animals in its lowest. What George Eliot calls '_the treasure of human affection_' depends as little for its value on any beliefs outside itself as does the treasure of animal appetite; and just as no want of religious faith can deprive the animals of the last, so no want of religious faith can deprive mankind of the first. It will remain a stable possession to us, amid the wreck of creeds, giving life a solemn and intense value of its own. It will never fail us as a sure test of conduct. Whatever guides us to this treasure we shall know is moral; whatever tends to withdraw us from it we shall know is immoral. Such is the positivist theory as to all the higher pleasures of life, of which affection confessedly is one of the chief, and also the most obviously human. Let us proceed now from generalities to special concrete facts, and see how far this theory is borne out by them. And we can find none better than those which are now before us--the special concrete facts of affection, and of sexual affection in particular.