Lewis continues his train of thought from “Men Without Chests”, criticizing the project of subjectivizing value. Lewis thinks the stakes are as grave as they can be: “the destruction of the society which accepts it”. But immediately, Lewis notes, such grave consequences do not make it false. And besides, there are “theoretical difficulties” as well. Those who advocate the subjectification of value, in this case the pseudonymous Gaius and Titius, presume some greater end even as they undercut traditional values. “In actual fact Gaius and Titius will be found to hold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of values which happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men of the professional classes during the period between the two wars. Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people’s values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough.” But if Gaius and Titius have some ultimate ground for value in mind, which cannot be so debunked, what might that be? Lewis considers whether “instinct” can ground human value, but notes that instinct is itself contradictory and cannot warrant the leap from is to ought. One will be inexorably forced back to some objective law that presents itself to our conscience as self-evident and obligatory. “This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements.” ~ Afterall

It is upon the Trunk that a gentleman works.
~ Analects of Confucius, I.2

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it. But this is not necessarily a refutation of subjectivismabout values as a theory. The true doctrine might be a doctrine whichif we accept we die. No one who speaks from within the Tao could reject it on that account: ‘εν δεφαει και’δλεσσου. But it hasnot yet come to that. There are theoretical difficulties in thephilosophy of Gaius and Titius.

However subjective they may be about sometraditional values, Gaius and Titius have shown by the very act ofwriting The Green Book that there must be some other valuesabout which they are not subjective at all. They write in order toproduce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if notbecause they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good,yet certainly because they think them to be the means to some state ofsociety which they regard as desirable. It would not be difficult tocollect from various passages in The Green Book what theirideal is. But we need not. The important point is not the precise nature of their end, but the fact that they have an end at all. They must have, or their book (being purely practical in intention) is written to no purpose. And this end must have real value in their eyes. To abstain from calling it good and to use, instead, such predicates as ‘necessary’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘efficient’ would be a subterfuge. They could be forced by argument to answer the questions ‘necessary for what?’, ‘progressing towards what?’, ‘effecting what?’; in the last resort they would have to admit that some state of affairs was in their opinion good for its own sake. And this time they couldnot maintain that ‘good’ simply described their own emotion aboutit. For the whole purpose of their book is so to condition the young reader that he will share their approval, and this would be either a fool’s or a villain’s undertaking unless they held that their approval was in some way valid or correct.

In actual fact Gaius and Titius will be found tohold, with complete uncritical dogmatism, the whole system of valueswhich happened to be in vogue among moderately educated young men ofthe professional classes during the period between the twowars.¹ Their scepticism about values is on the surface: itis for use on other people’s values; about the values current in theirown set they are not nearly sceptical enough. And this phenomenon is very usual. A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as theywould say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of theirown which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. Theyclaim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religioussanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ valuesmay emerge. I will now try to find out what happens if this isseriously attempted.

Let us continue to use the previous example — that of death for a good cause — not, of course, because virtue is the only value or martyrdom the only virtue, but because this is the experimentum crucis which shows different systems of thought in the clearest light. Let us suppose that anInnovator in values regards dulce et decorum and greaterlove hath no man as mere irrational sentiments which are to bestripped off in order that we may get down to the ‘realistic’ or’basic’ ground of this value. Where will he find such a ground?

First of all, he might say that the real value layin the utility of such sacrifice to the community. ‘Good’, he mightsay, ‘means what is useful to the community.’ But of course thedeath of the community is not useful to the community — only thedeath of some of its members. What is really meant is that the deathof some men is useful to other men. That is very true. But on whatground are some men being asked to die for the benefit of others?Every appeal to pride, honour, shame, or love is excluded by hypothesis. To use these would be to return to sentiment and theInnovator’s task is, having cut all that away, to explain to men, in terms of pure reasoning, why they will be well advised to die that others may live. He may say ‘Unless some of us risk death all of us are certain to die.’ But that will be true only in a limited number of cases; and even when it is true it provokes the very reasonable counter question ‘Why should I be one of those who take the risk?’

At this point the Innovator may ask why, after all,selfishness should be more ‘rational’ or ‘intelligent’ thanaltruism. The question is welcome. If by Reason we mean the processactually employed by Gaius and Titius when engaged in debunking (thatis, the connecting by inference of propositions, ultimately derivedfrom sense data, with further propositions), then the answer must bethat a refusal to sacrifice oneself is no more rational than a consentto do so. And no less rational. Neither choice is rational — orirrational — at all. From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of ‘rational’ value behind all the sentiments we have debunked. The Innovator will not take the first alternative, for practical principles known to all men by Reason are simply the Tao which he has set out to supersede. He is more likely to give up the quest for a ‘rational’core and to hunt for some other ground even more ‘basic’ and’realistic’.

This he will probably feel that he has found inInstinct. The preservation of society, and of the species itself, areends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they aregiven by Instinct. That is why there is no need to argue against theman who does not acknowledge them. We have an instinctive urge topreserve our own species. That is why men ought to work forposterity. We have no instinctive urge to keep promises or to respect individual life: that is why scruples of justice and humanity — in fact the Tao — can be properly swept away when they conflict with our real end, the preservation of the species. That, again, is why the modern situation permits and demands a new sexual morality: the old taboos served some real purpose in helping top reserve the species, but contraceptives have modified this and we can now abandon many of the taboos. For of course sexual desire, beinginstinctive, is to be gratified whenever it does not conflict with thepreservation of the species. It looks, in fact, as if an ethics basedon instinct will give the Innovator all he wants and nothing that hedoes not want.

In reality we have not advanced one step. I willnot insist on the point that Instinct is a name for we know not what(to say that migratory birds find their way by instinct is only to saythat we do not know how migratory birds find their way), for I thinkit is here being used in a fairly definite sense, to mean anunreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt by the members of agiven species. In what way does Instinct, thus conceived, help us tofind ‘real’ values? Is it maintained that we must obeyInstinct, that we cannot do otherwise? But if so, why are GreenBooks and the like written? Why this stream of exhortation todrive us where we cannot help going? Why such praise for those whohave submitted to the inevitable? Or is it maintained that if we doobey Instinct we shall be happy and satisfied? But the very questionwe are considering was that of facing death which (so far as theInnovator knows) cuts off every possible satisfaction: and if we havean instinctive desire for the good of posterity then this desire, bythe very nature of the case, can never be satisfied, since its aim isachieved, if at all, when we are dead. It looks very much as if theInnovator would have to say not that we must obey Instinct, nor thatit will satisfy us to do so, but that we ought to obeyit.²

But why ought we to obey Instinct? Is there anotherinstinct of a higher order directing us to do so, and a third of astill higher order directing us to obey it?—an infiniteregress of instincts? This is presumably impossible, but nothing elsewill serve. From the statement about psychological fact ‘I have animpulse to do so and so’ we cannot by any ingenuity derive thepractical principle ‘I ought to obey this impulse’. Even if it weretrue that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrificetheir own lives for the preservation of their fellows, it remains aquite separate question whether this is an impulse they should controlor one they should indulge. For even the Innovator admits that manyimpulses (those which conflict with the preservation of the species)have to be controlled. And this admission surely introduces us to ayet more fundamental difficulty.

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us toobey ‘people’. People say different things: so do instincts. Ourinstincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preservingthe species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts,whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to thatinstinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favourwould be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it,will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the veryact of listening to one rather than to others we have alreadyprejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of ourinstincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could neverlearn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive:the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, thedecision is worthless and there is no ground for placing thepreservation of the species above self-preservation or sexualappetite.

The idea that, without appealing to any courthigher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds forpreferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp atuseless words: we call it the ‘basic’, or ‘fundamental’, or ‘primal’,or ‘deepest’ instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal avalue judgement passed upon the instinct and therefore notderivable from it, or else they merely record its feltintensity, the frequency of its operation and its widedistribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value uponinstinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations aboutthe quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practicalconclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premisses alreadyconcealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in theindicative.³

Finally, it is worth inquiry whether thereis any instinct to care for posterity or preserve thespecies. I do not discover it in myself: and yet I am a man ratherprone to think of remote futurity—a man who can read Mr OlafStapledon with delight. Much less do I find it easy to believe thatthe majority of people who have sat opposite me in buses or stood withme in queues feel an unreflective impulse to do anything at all aboutthe species, or posterity. Only people educated in a particular wayhave ever had the idea ‘posterity’ before their minds at all. It isdifficult to assign to instinct our attitude towards an object whichexists only for reflective men. What we have by nature is an impulseto preserve our own children and grandchildren; an impulse which growsprogressively feebler as the imagination looks forward and finallydies out in the ‘deserts of vast futurity’. No parents who were guidedby this instinct would dream for a moment of setting up the claims oftheir hypothetical descendants against those of the baby actuallycrowing and kicking in the room. Those of us who accept the Taomay, perhaps, say that they ought to do so: but that is not open tothose who treat instinct as the source of value. As we pass frommother love to rational planning for the future we are passing awayfrom the realm of instinct into that of choice and reflection: and ifinstinct is the source of value, planning for the future ought to beless respectable and less obligatory than the baby language andcuddling of the fondest mother or the most fatuous nursery anecdotesof a doting father. If we are to base ourselves upon instinct, these things are the substance, and care for posterity the shadow — the huge, flickering shadow of the nursery happiness cast upon the screenof the unknown future. I do not say this projection is a bad thing:but then I do not believe that instinct is the ground of valuejudgements. What is absurd is to claim that your care for posterityfinds its justification in instinct and then flout at every turn theonly instinct on which it could be supposed to rest, tearing the childalmost from the breast to creche and kindergarten in the interests ofprogress and the coming race.

The truth finally becomes apparent that neither inany operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinctcan the Innovator find the basis for a system of values. None of theprinciples he requires are to be found there: but they are all to befound somewhere else. ‘All within the four seas are his brothers'(xii. 5) says Confucius of the Chün-tzu, the cuorgentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto saysthe Stoic. ‘Do as you would be done by,’ says Jesus. ‘Humanity is to be preserved,’ says Locke.⁴ All the practical principles behind the Innovator’s case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhereelse. Unless you accept these without question as being to the worldof action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have nopractical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions:they are premisses. You may, since they can give no ‘reason’ forthemselves of a kind to silence Gaius and Titius, regard them assentiments: but then you must give up contrasting ‘real’ or ‘rational’value with sentimental value. All value will be sentimental; and youmust confess (on pain of abandoning every value) that all sentiment isnot ‘merely’ subjective. You may, on the other hand, regard them asrational — nay as rationality itself — as things so obviouslyreasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof. But then you mustallow that Reason can be practical, that an ought must not bedismissed because it cannot produce some is as itscredential. If nothing is self-evident, nothing can beproved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothingis obligatory at all.

To some it will appear that I have merely restoredunder another name what they always meant by basic or fundamentalinstinct. But much more than a choice of words is involved. The Innovator attacks traditional values (the Tao) in defence of what he at first supposes to be (in some special sense) ‘rational’ or ‘biological’ values. But as we have seen, all the values which he usesin attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting forit, are themselves derived from the Tao. If he had reallystarted from scratch, from right outside the human tradition of value,no jugglery could have advanced him an inch towards the conceptionthat a man should die for the community or work for posterity. If the Tao falls, all his own conceptions of value fall with it. Not one of them can claim any authority other than that of the Tao. Only by such shreds of the Tao as he has inherited is heenabled even to attack it. The question therefore arises what title hehas to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject others. For ifthe bits he rejects have no authority, neither have those he retains:if what he retains is valid, what he rejects is equally valid too.

The Innovator, for example, rates high the claimsof posterity. He cannot get any valid claim for posterity out ofinstinct or (in the modern sense) reason. He is really deriving ourduty to posterity from the Tao; our duty to do good to all menis an axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do good to ourdescendants is a clear deduction from it. But then, in every form ofthe Tao which has come down to us, side by side with the dutyto children and descendants lies the duty to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and accept the other? Again, the Innovatormay place economic value first. To get people fed and clothed is thegreat end, and in pursuit of its scruples about justice and good faithmay be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about theimportance of getting the people fed and clothed. Unless the Innovatorwere himself using the Tao he could never have learned of sucha duty. But side by side with it in the Tao lie those duties ofjustice and good faith which he is ready to debunk. What is hiswarrant? He may be a Jingoist, a Racialist, an extreme nationalist,who maintains that the advancement of his own people is the object towhich all else ought to yield. But no kind of factual observation andno appeal to instinct will give him a ground for this option. Oncemore, he is in fact deriving it from the Tao: a duty to our ownkin, because they are our own kin, is a part of traditionalmorality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it,lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the longrun, all men are our brothers. Whence comes the Innovator’s authorityto pick and choose?

Since I can see no answer to these questions, I draw the following conclusions. This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

Does this mean, then, that no progress in our perceptions of value can ever take place? That we are bound down forever to an unchanging code given once for all? And is it, in anyevent, possible to talk of obeying what I call the Tao? If we lump together, as I have done, the traditional moralities of East and West, the Christian, the Pagan, and the Jew, shall we not find many contradictions and some absurdities? I admit all this. Some criticism, some removal of contradictions, even some real development, is required. But there are two very different kinds of criticism.

A theorist about language may approach his native tongue, as it were from outside, regarding its genius as a thing that has no claim on him and advocating wholesale alterations of its idiom and spelling in the interests of commercial convenience or scientific accuracy. That is one thing. A great poet, who has ‘loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue’, may also make great alterations in it, but his changes of the language are made in the spirit of the language itself: he works from within. The language which suffers, has also inspired the changes. That is a different thing — as different as the works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It is the difference between alteration from within and alteration from without: between the organic and the surgical. In the same way, the Tao admits development from within. There is a difference between a real moral advance and a mere innovation. From the Confucian ‘Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you’ to the Christian ‘Do as you would be done by’ is a real advance. The morality of Nietzsche is a mere innovation. The first is an advance because no one who did not admit the validity of the old maxim could see reason for accepting the new one, and anyone who accepted the old would at once recognize the new as an extension of the same principle. If he rejected it, he would have to reject it as a superfluity, something that went too far, not as something simply heterogeneous from his own ideas of value. But the Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all. It is the difference between a man who says to us: ‘You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?’ and a man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.’

Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands. Only they can know what those directions are. The outsider knows nothing about the matter. His attempts at alteration, as we have seen, contradict themselves. So far from being able to harmonize discrepancies in its letter by penetration to its spirit, he merely snatches at some one precept, on which the accidents of time and place happen to have riveted his attention, and then rides it to death — for no reason that he can give. From within the Tao itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao. This is what Confucius meant when he said ‘With those who follow a different Way it is useless to take counsel’.⁵ This is why Aristotle said that only those who have been well brought up can usefully study ethics: to the corrupted man, the man who stands outside the Tao, the very starting point of this science is invisible.⁶ He may be hostile, but he cannot be critical: he does not know what is being discussed. This is why it was also said ‘This people that knoweth not the Law is accursed’⁷ and ‘He that believeth not shall be damned’.⁸ An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else. In particular instances it may, no doubt, be a matter of some delicacy to decide where the legitimate internal criticism ends and the fatal external kind begins. But wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position. The legitimate reformer endeavours to show that the precept in question conflicts with some precept which its defenders allow to be more fundamental, or that it does not really embody the judgement of value it professes to embody. The direct frontal attack ‘Why?’ — ‘What good does it do?’ — ‘Who said so?’ is never permissible; not because it is harsh or offensive but because no values at all can justify themselves on that level. If you persist in that kind of trial you will destroy all values, and so destroy the bases of your own criticism as well as the thing criticized. You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil, and he alone, who can recognize Reason when it comes.⁹ It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man ‘perfect as touching the Law’ who learns where and how that Law was deficient.¹⁰ In order to avoid misunderstanding, I may add that though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more ‘realistic’ basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with.

Yet how can the modern mind be expected to embracethe conclusion we have reached? This Tao which, it seems, we must treat as an absolute is simply a phenomenon like any other — the reflection upon the minds of our ancestors of the agricultural rhythm in which they lived or even of their physiology. We know already in principle how such things are produced:soon we shall know in detail: eventually we shall be able to producethem at will. Of course, while we did not know how minds were made, weaccepted this mental furniture as a datum, even as a master. But manythings in nature which were once our masters have become ourservants. Why not this? Why must our conquest of nature stop short, instupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘nature’ whichhas hitherto been called the conscience of man? You threaten us withsome obscure disaster if we step outside it: but we have beenthreatened in that way by obscurantists at every step in our advance,and each time the threat has proved false. You say we shall have novalues at all if we step outside the Tao. Very well: we shallprobably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them. Letus regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as aninteresting psychological survival: let us step right out of all thatand start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man isto be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, butbecause we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, letus now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.

This is a very possible position: and those whohold it cannot be accused of self-contradiction like the half-heartedsceptics who still hope to find ‘real’ values when they have debunkedthe traditional ones. This is the rejection of the concept of valuealtogether. I shall need another lecture to consider it.

Notes

1 The real (perhaps unconscious) philosophy ofGaius and Titius becomes clear if we contrast the two following listsof disapprovals and approvals.

A. Disapprovals: A mother’s appeal to achild to be ‘brave’ is ‘nonsense’ (Green Book, p. 62). Thereference of the word ‘gentleman’ is ‘extremely vague’ (ibid.) ‘Tocall a man a coward tells us really nothing about what he does'(p. 64). Feelings about a country or empire are feelings ‘aboutnothing in particular’ (p. 77).

B. Approvals: Those who prefer the arts of peace to the artsof war (it is not said in what circumstances) are such that ‘we maywant to call them wise men’ (p. 65). The pupil is expected ‘to believein a democratic community life’ (p. 67). ‘Contact with the ideas ofother people is, as we know, healthy’ (p. 86). The reason forbathrooms (‘that people are healthier and pleasanter to meet when theyare clean’) is ‘too obvious to need mentioning’ (p. 142). It will beseen that comfort and security, as known to a suburban street inpeace-time, are the ultimate values: those things which can aloneproduce or spiritualize comfort and security are mocked. Man lives bybread alone, and the ultimate source of bread is the baker’s van:peace matters more than honour and can be preserved by jeering atcolonels and reading newspapers.

2 The most determined effort which I know toconstruct a theory of value on the basis of ‘satisfaction of impulses’is that of Dr I. A. Richards (Principles of Literary Criticism,1924). The old objection to defining Value as Satisfaction is theuniversal value judgement that ‘it is better to be Socratesdissatisfied than a pig satisfied’. To meet this Dr Richardsendeavours to show that our impulses can be arranged in a hierarchyand some satisfactions preferred to others without an appeal to anycriterion other than satisfaction. He does this by the doctrine thatsome impulses are more ‘important’ than others—animportant impulse being one whose frustration involves thefrustration of other impulses. A good systematization (i.e. the goodlife) consists in satisfying as many impulses as possible; whichentails satisfying the ‘important’ at the expense of the’unimportant’. The objections to this scheme seem to me to be two:

(I) Without a theory of immortality it leaves noroom for the value of noble death. It may, of course, be said that aman who has saved his life by treachery will suffer for the rest ofthat life from frustration. But not, surely, frustration of allhis impulses? Whereas the dead man will have nosatisfaction. Or is it maintained that since he had no unsatisfiedimpulses he is better off than the disgraced and living man? This atonce raises the second objection.

(2) Is the value of a systematization to be judgedby the presence of satisfactions or the absence of dissatisfactions?The extreme case is that of the dead man in whom satisfactions anddissatisfactions (on the modern view) both equal zero, as against thesuccessful traitor who can still eat, drink, sleep, scratch andcopulate, even if he cannot have friendship or love orself-respect. But it arises at other levels. Suppose A has only500 impulses and all are satisfied, and that B has 1200impulses whereof 700 are satisfied and 500 not: which has the bettersystematization? There is no doubt which Dr Richards actuallyprefers—he even praises art on the ground that it makes us’discontented’ with ordinary crudities! (op. cit., p. 230). The onlytrace I find of a philosophical basis for this preference is thestatement that ‘the more complex an activity the more conscious it is'(p. 109). But if satisfaction is the only value, why should increaseof consciousness be good? For consciousness is the condition of alldissatisfactions as well as of all satisfactions. Dr Richards’s systemgives no support to his (and our) actual preference for civil lifeover savage and human over animal—or even for life over death.

3 The desperate expedients to which a man can bedriven if he attempts to base value on fact are well illustrated by DrC. H. Waddington’s fate in Science and Ethics. Dr Waddingtonhere explains that ‘existence is its own justification’ (p. 14), andwrites: ‘An existence which is essentially evolutionary is itself thejustification for an evolution towards a more comprehensive existence'(p. 17). I do not think Dr Waddington is himself at ease in this view,for he does endeavour to recommend the course of evolution to us onthree grounds other than its mere occurrence, (a) That thelater stages include or ‘comprehend’ the earlier, (b) ThatT. H. Huxley’s picture of Evolution will not revolt you if you regardit from an ‘actuarial’ point of view, (c) That, any way, afterall, it isn’t half so bad as people make out (‘not so morallyoffensive that we cannot accept it’, p. 18). These three palliativesare more creditable to Dr Waddington’s heart than his head and seem tome to give up the main position. If Evolution is praised (or, atleast, apologized for) on the ground of any properties itexhibits, then we are using an external standard and the attempt tomake existence its own justification has been abandoned. If thatattempt is maintained, why does Dr Waddington concentrate onEvolution: i.e., on a temporary phase of organic existence in oneplanet? This is ‘geocentric’. If Good = ‘whatever Nature happens to bedoing’, then surely we should notice what Nature is doing as a whole;and Nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily andirreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part ofthe universe, so that Dr Waddington’s ethics, stripped of theirunaccountable bias towards such a parochial affair as tellurianbiology, would leave murder and suicide our only duties. Even this, Iconfess, seems to me a lesser objection than the discrepancy betweenDr Waddington’s first principle and the value judgements men actuallymake. To value anything simply because it occurs is in fact to worshipsuccess, like Quislings or men of Vichy. Other philosophies morewicked have been devised: none more vulgar. I am far from suggestingthat Dr Waddington practises in real life such grovelling prostrationbefore the fait accompli. Let us hope that Rasselas,chap. 22, gives the right picture of what his philosophy amounts to inaction. (‘The philosopher, supposing the rest vanquished, rose up anddeparted with the air of a man that had co-operated with the presentsystem.’)

4 See Appendix.

5 Analects of Confucius, xv. 39.

6 Eth. Nic. 1095 b, 1140 b, 1151 a.

7 John 7:49. The speaker said it in malice, but with more truththan he meant. Cf. John 13:51.

8 Mark 16:6

9 Republic, 402 A

10 Philippians 3:6