of beauty as in the discovery of propositions about what is.  Hence, we can hardly be content to leave the ‘positive’ sciences and the ‘sciences of values’ simply standing over against one another.  There is that which ‘is’, and there is that which ’ought to be’, and, at first sight at any rate, the two seem very different.  Much that is—­ignorance, sin, misery, ugliness—­ought not to be, and much that ought to be is very far from being fact.  We are accustomed to regard this as a matter of course, but, closely considered, it is perhaps the supreme wonder of all the wonders.  We creatures of circumstance, as we call ourselves, can take stock of the sum of things to which we belong, and judge it.  It is not simply that we can, and often do, wish that it were different in various ways; we can judge that it ought to be different, and you may find a man of science like Huxley, after a life spent in trying to understand the laws which prevail in the world, deliberately making it his last word to his fellows that their duty is to set themselves to reverse the ’cosmic process’, to select for preservation just the human types which, if the much-abused metaphor may be tolerated, Nature, left to herself, selects for destruction.

We might, of course, regard this apparently unreconcilable conflict between the arrangements which do prevail; as is commonly supposed, in the world, and those which ought to prevail, as a mystery which we must despair of ever understanding.  But, to say the least of it, it is hardly consistent with the philosophic temper to treat any question as an insoluble riddle until one has tried all ways of solution and found them culs-de-sac.  If we are to be thoroughly loyal to the spirit which prompts all intelligent inquiry, we are bound at least to ask whether it is, after all, beyond the power of human intelligence to think of the world as a system in which somehow, in the end, what ought to be prescribes what is.  It is true that, for reasons already mentioned, we cannot, like Spinoza or the Sufis, reconcile facts and values by the simple assumption that what is is shown, by the fact that it is, to be what ought to be, and that our common conviction that sin and ugliness are painfully real is only an illusion due to spiritual short sight.  We have just as much reason to believe that some pleasures are good, that pain which is not a means to good is evil, that justice and purity are good, lewdness and cruelty bad, that some colours are lovely and others odious, as we have to believe that between any two points there is always a third, or that, if B and C are two points there is always a point D on the straight line BC such that C is between B and D, and a point A on CB such that B is between C and A.  Indeed, the most fanatical champion of what Mr. Russell in his anti-ethical mood calls ‘ethical neutrality’ cannot well avoid recognizing the truth of at least