itself, which is either the same thing, or a contradiction in terms.

CLVII

To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary; and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its truth.

CLVIII

It is remarkable that Hume does not refer to the sentimental arguments for the immortality of the soul which are so much in vogue at the present day; and which are based upon our desire for a longer conscious existence than that which nature appears to have allotted to us. Perhaps he did not think them worth notice. For indeed it is not a little strange, that our strong desire that a certain occurrence should happen should be put forward as evidence that it will happen. If my intense desire to see the friend, from whom I have parted, does not bring him from the other side of the world, or take me thither; if the mother's agonised prayer that her child should live has not prevented him from dying; experience certainly affords no presumption that the strong desire to be alive after death, which we call the aspiration after immortality, is any more likely to be gratified. As Hume truly says, "All doctrines are to be suspected which are favoured by our passions"; and the doctrine, that we are immortal because we should extremely like to be so, contains the quintessence of suspiciousness.

CLIX

If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired that which could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.

CLX

To fail in justice, or in benevolence, is to be displeased with one's self. But happiness is impossible without inward self-approval; and, hence, every man who has any regard to his own happiness and welfare, will find his best reward in the practice of every moral duty.

CLXI

Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent; but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in anywise playful. And though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle ça va sans dire.

CLXII

If mankind cannot be engaged in practices "full of austerity and rigour?" by the love of righteousness and the fear of evil, without seeking for other compensation than that which flows from the gratification of such love and the consciousness of escape from debasement, they are in a bad case. For they will assuredly find that virtue presents no very close likeness to the sportive leader of the Joyous hours in Hume's rosy picture; but that she is an awful Goddess, whose ministers are the Furies, and whose highest reward is peace.

CLXIII

Under its theological aspect, morality is obedience to the will of God; and the ground for such obedience is two-fold: either we ought to obey God because He will punish us if we disobey Him, which is an argument based on the utility of obedience; or our obedience ought to flow from our love towards God, which is an argument based on pure feeling and for which no reason can be given. For, if any man should say that he takes no pleasure in the contemplation of the ideal of perfect holiness, or, in other words, that he does not love God, the attempt to argue him into acquiring that pleasure would be as hopeless as the endeavour to persuade Peter Bell of the "witchery of the soft blue sky."

CLXIV

In whichever way we look at the matter, morality is based on feeling, not on reason; though reason alone is competent to trace out the effects of our actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is founded on the love of one's neighbour; and goodness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less "innate" and "necessary" than they are. Some people cannot by any means be got to understand the first book of Euclid; but the truths of mathematics are no less necessary and binding on the great mass of mankind. Some there are who cannot feel the difference between the "Sonata Appassionata" and "Cherry Ripe"; or between a grave-stone-cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belvidere; but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged. While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy, are incapable of a sense of duty; but neither does their existence affect the foundations of morality. Such pathological deviations from true manhood are merely the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world of consciousness; and the anatomist of the mind leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body would ignore abnormal specimens.

And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons and Raffaelles, in whom the innate faculty for science or art seems to need but a touch to spring into full vigour, and through whom the human race obtains new possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions of beauty: so there have been men of moral genius, to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of moral perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have attained: though, happily for them, they can feel the beauty of a vision, which lay beyond the reach of their dull imaginations, and count life well spent in shaping some faint image of it in the actual world.

CLXV

The horror of "Materialism" which weighs upon the minds of so many excellent people appears to depend, in part, upon the purely accidental connexion of some forms of materialistic philosophy with ethical and religious tenets by which they are repelled; and, partly, on the survival of a very ancient superstition concerning the nature of matter.

This superstition, for the tenacious vitality of which the idealistic philosophers who are, more or less, disciples of Plato and the theologians who have been influenced by them, are responsible, assumes that matter is something, not merely inert and perishable, but essentially base and evil-natured, if not actively antagonistic to, at least a negative deadweight upon, the good.

CLXVI

Judging by contemporary literature, there are numbers of highly cultivated and indeed superior persons to whom the material world is altogether contemptible; who can see nothing in a handful of garden soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the passive and the corruptible.

To modern science, these assumptions are as much out of date as the equally venerable errors, that the sun goes round the earth every four-and-twenty hours, or that water is an elementary body. The handful of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of busy workers; the rusty nail is an aggregation of millions of particles, moving with inconceivable velocity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect measure; harmonic with like performances throughout the solar system. If there is good ground for any conclusion, there is such for the belief that the substance of these particles has existed and will exist, that the energy which stirs them has persisted and will persist, without assignable limit, either in the past or the future. Surely, as Heracleitus said of his kitchen with its pots and pans, "Here also are the gods." Little as we have, even yet, learned of the material universe, that little makes for the belief that it is a system of unbroken order and perfect symmetry, of which the form incessantly changes, while the substance and the energy are imperishable.

CLXVII

Of all the dangerous mental habits, that which schoolboys call "cocksureness" is probably the most perilous; and the inestimable value of metaphysical discipline is that it furnishes an effectual counterpoise to this evil proclivity. Whoso has mastered the elements of philosophy knows that the attribute of unquestionable certainty appertains only to the existence of a state of consciousness so long as it exists; all other beliefs are mere probabilities of a higher or lower order. Sound metaphysic is an amulet which renders its possessor proof alike against the poison of superstition and the counter-poison of shallow negation; by showing that the affirmations