to use Pascal’s famous metaphor, a prudent man will do well to bet neither for nor against immortality.  Unfortunately, as Pascal said, you can’t help betting; il faut parier.  If it makes any difference to the relative values of different goods whether the soul dies with the body or not, one must take sides in the matter.  In making one’s choices one must prefer either the things it is reasonable to regard as good for a creature whose days are threescore years and ten or those which it is reasonable to regard as best for a being who is to live for ever.  The only way to escape having to bet is not to be born.

I come to the second problem, the one which, as I think, Mr. Russell arbitrarily ignores.  A human being is not a mere knowledge-machine.  The relation of knower to known is not the only relation in which he stands to himself and to other things.  The ‘world’ is not merely something at which he can look on, it is also an instrument for achieving what he regards as good and for creating what he judges to be beautiful.  To do good and to make beautiful things are just as much man’s business as to discover truth.  A knowledge of the world would be very incomplete if it did not include knowledge of what ought to be, whether because it is morally best or because it is beautiful, as well as knowledge of what is actually there.  And it is not immediately evident how the two, knowledge of what ought to be and knowledge of what merely is, are connected.

There is, to be sure, one way in which it is pretty plain that they are not related.  You cannot learn what ought to be—­what is beautiful or morally good—­merely by first finding out what has been or what is likely to be.  This simple consideration of itself deprives many of the big volumes which have been written about the ‘evolution’ of art and morals of most of their value.  They may have interest if they are treated only as contributions to the history of opinion about art and morals.  But unhappily their authors often assume that we can find out what really is right or beautiful by merely discovering what men have thought right and beautiful in the remote past or guessing what they will think right or beautiful in the distant future.  The fallacy underlying this procedure has been happily exposed by Mr. Russell himself in an occasional essay where he remarks that it is antecedently just as likely that evolution is going from bad to worse as that it is going from good to better. Unless it is going from bad to worse it is obviously absurd to suppose that you can find out what is good by discovering what our distant ancestors thought good.  And if (as may be the case) it is going from bad to worse, no amount of knowledge about what our posterity will think good can throw any light on the question what is good.  There is, in fact, no ground whatever for believing that ‘evolution’ need be the same thing as progress, and this is enough to knock the bottom out of ‘evolutionary ethics’.