But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of human character--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause--these have no tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way, the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them. High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for ever prevail among mankind--the shortcomings in himself of which he becomes more conscious as he becomes really better--these things, you may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being particularly happy. If you see a man happy, as the world goes--contented with himself and contented with what is round him--such a man may be, and probably is, decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest will not come out of him. Judging merely by outward phenomena--judging merely by what we call reason--you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it. Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is completely resolved into that. True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of honour and character--in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets or denies the nobler principles of action. But the end is often long in coming; and these nobler principles are meanwhile _not_ provided for us by the inductive philosophy. Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think something--a readiness to devote our energies while we live, to devote our lives, if nothing else will serve, to what we call our country--what are we to say of that? I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism. He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My friend believed in the progress of humanity--he could not narrow his sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.' A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.