On the other hand, it is quite certain that when we call an act right or a picture beautiful we do not mean to be expressing a mere personal liking of our own, any more than when we make a statement about the composition of sulphuric acid or the product of 9 and 7.  As Dr. Rashdall has put it, when we say that a given act is right, we do not pretend to be infallible.  We know that we may fall into mistakes about right and wrong just as we may make mistakes in working a multiplication sum.  But we do mean to say that if our own verdict ‘that act is right’ is a true one, then the verdict of any one who retorts ‘that act is wrong’ is false, just as when we state the result of our multiplication we mean to assert that if we have done the sum correctly any one else who brings out a different answer has worked it wrongly.  Indeed, we might convince ourselves that these verdicts are not meant to be expressions of private and personal liking in a still simpler way.  All of us must be aware that the line of action we pronounce ‘right’ is not always what we like nor the conduct we call ‘wrong’ what we dislike.  We often like doing what we fully believe to be wrong and dislike doing what we believe right, without being in the least confused in our moral verdicts by this collision of liking and conviction.  So again it is a common thing to like one poem or picture better than another, and yet to be fully persuaded that the work we like the less is the better work of art.  Indeed, the whole process of moral and aesthetic education may be said to exist just in learning to like most what is really best.

All this, put into so many words, may seem too simple to call for statement, but it makes nonsense of a great deal that has been written about ethics of late years.  It disposes once for all of the theory that moral and aesthetic verdicts are ‘subjective’, that is, that they mean no more than that the persons who make them have certain personal likes and dislikes of which these verdicts are a record.  Of course, it might be urged that all of us do indeed mean to express truths which are independent of our personal likings when we make moral and aesthetic judgements, but that we never succeed in doing so.  A man might conceivably hold that there is no real distinction between right and wrong or between beautiful and ugly, but that it is a universal illusion of mankind to suppose that there are such distinctions.  Or he might hold that the distinctions are real, but that we do not know where to draw them.  He might suggest that some ways of acting are really right and others really wrong, but that we do not know which are the right acts and so regularly confuse what we like doing with what is ‘really’ right.  Mr. Russell, in some of his later writings, seems to incline to views of this sort.  But the suggestion is really unmotived.  It would be just as reasonable to suggest that all geometrical or astronomical propositions are only expressions of the personal and private feelings