CHAPTER IV.
GOODNESS AS ITS OWN REWARD.
'_Who chooses me must give, and hazard all he hath._' Inscription on the Leaden Casket.

_Merchant of Venice._ What I have been urging in the last chapter is really nothing more than the positivists admit themselves.

It will be found, if we study their utterances as a whole, that they by no means believe practically in their own professions, or consider that the end of action can be either defined and verified by sociology, or made attractive by sympathy.

On the contrary, they confess plainly how inadequate these are by themselves, by continually supplementing them with additions from quite another quarter.

But their fault is that this confession is, apparently, only half conscious with them; and they are for ever reproducing arguments as sufficient which they have already in other moments implicitly condemned as meaningless.