The teachings of positive culture, in fact, rest on the naive supposition that shine and shadow, as it were, are portable things; and that we can take bright objects out of the sunshine, and dark objects out of the shadow, and setting them both together in the diffused grey light of a studio, make a magical mosaic out of them, of gloom and glitter.

Or such teachings, to put the matter yet more simply, are like telling us to pick a primrose at noonday, and to set it by our bed-side for a night-light.
It is plain therefore that, in that loss of zest and interest, which the deadening of the moral sense, as we have seen, must bring to life, we shall get no help there.

The massy fabric of which saints and heroes were the builders, will never be re-elected by this mincing moral dandyism.
But there is another last resource of the modern school, which is far more worthy of attention, and which, being entirely _sui generis_, I have reserved to treat of here.

That resource is the devotion to truth as truth; not for the sake of its consequences, but in scorn of them.
Here we are told we have at least one moral end that can never be taken away from us.

It will still survive to give life a meaning, a dignity, and a value, even should the pursuit of it prove destructive to all the others.