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The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly, what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be real. But whereas those losses are but personal, and possibly our regrets selfish, this loss is more than personal, and the regret not merely selfish. It is not merely that we personally have held a mistaken opinion, or that any self-sacrifice—miserably small and unworthy in the retrospect—that we have made has been made for a losing cause. It is that apart from our personal share in the matter, which rated at its true value is as naught, the thing is wrong; it ought not to be. Of that we are just as certain as that our past life has not been what it ought to have been, what it might have been. The past is past beyond recall, but for the future hitherto there has been hope and faith, faith that what ought to be may be, even for us, hope that it will be so. But now, in place of hope and faith, we have the scientific certainty that the future of humanity is devoted to the triumph of the thing that ought not to be. The only consolation left to us is the inextinguishable, the unconquerable conviction that right is right even though it should not prevail. To this conviction we must hold, though the heavens should fall. To it we must hold, though it bring, as bring it must, according to Mr. Huxley, sorrow and pain and the renunciation of our own happiness.

These are hard sayings. But there is a yet harder to be added to them. Even though it should involve the renunciation of our intellectual superiority to other people, we must hold to our conviction. If we are in earnest about our moral convictions, we shall reject any suggestion that they are not after all really true, even if that suggestion seems to afford the only way of escaping from the conclusion that faith in religion has the same basis in reason as faith in science.

In proclaiming our conviction that right is right, we affirm and intend to affirm that it is so not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. In the same way, an established scientific truth is not one of those matters about which reasonable persons, who are competent to judge, may reasonably hold different opinions: it is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact. Indeed, both kinds of truth, moral truths and scientific truths, are quite independent of individual and personal opinion. There are people in whose opinion the earth is flat; but the earth is not flat, nor can their opinion alter the fact. There was a time when all the laws of nature were unknown to man or misconceived by him; but they operated as usual, quite unaffected by his ideas. So there are people who consider successful roguery ideal, and who would make a fortune by promoting fraudulent companies, if they could; but honesty remains a duty, in spite of their ideas. Right is right, even though there be brutes in human form; and right was right, even when the ape and tiger ruled in man, and even though they were fine fellows, in their own opinion. Cruelty and selfishness never were right at any time, and never will be. The laws of morality, like the laws of science, are objectively true: they do not vary with the opinions men entertain about them; the earth, for instance, did not move or cease to move round the sun according as men imagined Galileo to be right or wrong, nor has right ceased to be right even when the world has been most depraved.

A moral judgment, then, like a scientific judgment, is objective, not subjective; it is not the expression of a mere opinion, but the statement of a fact which has an existence independent of man. If now we ask what sort of an existence it has, it is clear that what is and what ought to be have not in all cases the same kind of existence: the thing which is may sometimes also be the thing that ought to be, but often it is not. Now, when the latter is the case, when a thing is felt to be a crying evil, a foul injustice that calls for remedy, in what sense does the justice exist on which we call to drive out the injustice? The thing which ought not to be exists, and is in possession. The thing which ought to be delays its coming. Shall we say, then, that, while that is so, it exists indeed, but exists as an ideal, as something which we know ought to be and are resolved shall be? That it must present itself to some mind or other as an object of desire, and as a possibility capable of fulfilment, is certain. That it does so present itself to man is what we mean when we attribute to him the power of moral judgment and moral action. But when we speak of man's moral judgments as being objectively true, we imply that they exist not merely in his mind, but also elsewhere. But ideals can only exist in a mind; judgments can be pronounced only by a judge. When, therefore, we affirm that in objectivity and validity our moral judgments are on a par with our scientific judgments, and that our knowledge of what ought to be is as real and true as our knowledge of what is, that the existence of ethical nature, with its demands upon our reason, is a fact as indisputable as the existence of cosmic nature, we are implicitly affirming also the existence of a mind, other than human, from whose moral judgments the laws of morality derive their validity; and as those laws are eternal and immutable, as right is right always and from eternity to eternity, so must be the mind in which they are and from which they proceed.

To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. When the desire to amend our life is strong upon us, when we are most conscious of the heavy difference between actual amendment and amendment in idea alone, then we are most certain of the reality of the moral ideal as a fact, both of immediate consciousness at the moment and of permanent significance for us and for all men. To say that our moral convictions correspond to no real facts is simply to deny to them any validity at all. To say that the facts to which they correspond are real, but are purely subjective, being but moods, and often passing moods, of the individual, is merely to say that our moral convictions are illusions and right-doing only fancy. Nor do we mend matters if we add that all men are more or less subject to these moods, that right and wrong are purely human institutions; for if their value in the individual is naught, their existence in the multitude does but add to ciphers ciphers. On the other hand, if the moral ideal is no figment of man's imagination, if its existence does not come and go with his fitful moral struggles, then its permanent abode, the centre from which it manifests itself, must be in some permanent intelligence at the centre of things.

The Pessimistic interpretation of evolution suggests another way of reaching the same conclusion. That form of Pessimism represents cosmic nature as indifferent, if not hostile, to ethical nature; the former by its law of the struggle for existence favours the survival of the strongest and the most selfish; the latter with its moral laws strives to suspend the struggle for existence, and to defeat the selfishness which the former seeks to perpetuate and extend. Human evolution is in its essence the struggle of man as a moral being against nature as non-moral or anti-moral; and the curve traced by human evolution is the resultant of the opposition of the two forces—the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, nature. During the first part of its course the line of human evolution rises, but during the latter part it is doomed to fall; and the curve will be completed when man, having traversed every stage of moral degradation, is merged once more in the brute matter to which originally he owed his being. Against this victory of cosmic nature man, as a moral being, protests and fights. He protests that it is wrong—wrong, not because it brings him more pain than pleasure, for right-doing also may have that result, but wrong without regard to his feelings, so that any impartial spectator who witnessed the struggle would condemn and regret the issue. If this is not so, if the condemnation is the expression merely of human prejudice, then there is nothing in the defeat of ethical nature or in the victory of its enemy, cosmic nature, really to regret; the difference between right and wrong is not an absolute or real distinction, corresponding to real facts, and the victory of cosmic nature, even if it runs counter to man's prejudices, is not thereby shown to be really wrong, though man naturally is under the illusion that it is.

The coarse and immoral piece of vulgarity which condones an act of wrong-doing on the ground that "it will be all the same a hundred years hence," is, with an extension of time, as applicable to the race generally as to the individual in particular. In a million, or a billion, years hence it will, according to the pessimistic interpretation of evolution, be all the same: matter and motion will alone exist, completely indifferent to right and wrong. What does it matter, then, whether we do right or wrong? Ultimately, it will make no difference: the distinction between right and wrong is not one of permanent value, or based on any lasting difference in things. Nor is it strange that a cause which is based on an illusion should be doomed to defeat. What is strange is that anyone should invite us to renounce happiness for such an unmeaning struggle.

The only reply to such loose talk is that it does matter, here and now, always and to all time, that right should triumph over wrong. It will not do to say that it matters now, but will not matter hereafter, for, if it is of no importance then, neither is it of any importance now. But if right-doing is the most important thing in the world, more important than happiness, more important to all time even than the perpetual redistribution of matter and motion, to whom is it important? Not exclusively, nor even primarily, to ourselves; for the essence of right-doing is the attempt to put self away and forget it, the yearning to be lifted above personal considerations and thought of self, the conviction that whilst it matters all the world to me, to do the right, the matter does not end with me. The matter is not of merely personal importance to me, nor important simply because I choose to think it so. Its value and significance are apprehended—alas! too rarely—by me, they are not created by me. Its significance and importance are real, not fictitious; that reality is not created by man, it is not a human prejudice, but exists independent of man and what he thinks. To matter and motion, those perpetual manifestations of the Power or Reality which underlies them, nothing can have any meaning or importance: it is only to a mind that things can be significant or important. If, then, the importance of right-doing is real, it is because it really matters to the Power, which underlies all things, that we should do right; and that Power must be of the nature of an intelligence, for it is only a mind which can either apprehend values or assign them. If the microcosm, man, can pass a valid sentence of condemnation upon the macrocosm, nature, it is only because and so far as his moral nature places him in direct communication with the heart of things and gives him knowledge of the will of that Power on which microcosm and macrocosm alike depend for their existence. If the distinction between right and wrong is one by which man can correctly judge between himself and the cosmos, the distinction and the judgment must proceed from a source superior to both. If it is not, then the Pessimistic interpretation of evolution falls to the ground, because it is based on the assumption that its condemnation of cosmic nature is a correct judgment. Not only does Pessimism fall, but the element of truth and reality which Pessimism contains must also be abandoned; if the distinction between right and wrong is not sufficient for the task put upon it by Pessimism, neither is it sufficient for us to build our lives on. In fine, either the ultimate defeat of the ethical process matters, or it does not. If it does not, why suffer sorrow and pain in the vain endeavour to stave it off? If it does, then to whom? No longer to man, for he will have joined the extinct fauna. Therefore to some moral intelligence to whom the triumph of right is a matter of importance.

From this dilemma the only escape seems to be frankly to admit that a billion years hence it will be "all the same," but to deny that, because it will be all the same then, it is a matter of indifference now. This argument, then, maintains that it will be all the same ultimately, and that it is an illusion to imagine that when man is extinct it can possibly matter. Here and now, however, and indeed as long as mankind continues to exist, right-doing is of the highest conceivable importance to man, more important even than happiness. But it is only as long as mankind continues to exist that it can continue to be important: its importance only exists in man's mind, and perishes with it. To say, therefore, that the ultimate defeat of the ethical process will, when established, be regrettable, is only to say that if we, or any other moral judge, were there to see it, we should feel regret about it; but we cannot possibly maintain that, because a moral judge would regret it, if he were there, therefore there will be one there to regret it. Of course, it is possible that the Unknowable may be a moral intelligence of this kind, because everything is possible with regard to the Unknowable. But we can neither affirm nor deny that or anything else about the Unknowable, for then the Unknowable would cease so far to be unknowable.

The contention of this argument, then, is that for us men, and (as far as we have any positive knowledge) for us men alone, the laws of morality are real, intensely real; but their reality begins with man and ends with man. To this contention the reply is that as regards their reality the laws of morality are on exactly the same footing as the laws of science. Take the theory of evolution for instance: from scientific observations of what is going on now it infers what has been and what will be, it reconstructs the past and forecasts the future; it frames pictures of the globe as it was before man was evolved; it forms conceptions of the earth as it will be long after man is extinct. These conceptions and pictures, however, exist only in the mind of man, for the future does not yet exist and the past has ceased to be. That is to say, evolution is an inference, or rather a mass of inferences, which like all inferences exist in the mind, could not have existed before the mind, and cannot exist when the mind has ceased to be. Science, being the work of the mind (for we cannot say that it requires no intelligence), is just man's notion of what has been, is, and will be, in the same way that morality is man's conception of what ought to be. If we say that what ought to be will cease and become meaningless when man is extinct, then we must say the same of what has been, is, and will be. If the good, the noble, the right, are merely human ideas of what ought to be, matter and motion are merely human conceptions of what is. If the reality of the former is only to be found in the human mind, so is the reality of the latter. If the reality of the one is to cease with human existence, so must the reality of the other. On the other hand, if either is to exist when mankind is no more, it is only in some mind that it can exist. It is only for a person that anything can be right or good. It is only a person that can see the past summed up or the future contained in the present. If it is legitimate and logical to infer that what is will continue to be after man's disappearance from the earth, so it is to draw the same inference with regard to what ought to be. If science is true really, and does not merely appear so to man, it must be true for some mind other than human: by an intelligence alone can truth be apprehended, or the right approved. But if truth is limited to the human mind, and ceases with it, then evolution must cease to be true when men cease to exist. Nay, in that case it cannot claim to be true at all, or rather does not claim to be true, but only seeming. On the other hand, if the law of gravity, for instance, was true before man's appearance, its truth must have dwelt in some mind. If it was not true then, we have no better reason for believing it to be true now. In fine, truth and right, what is and what ought to be, must either be dismissed as mere human imaginings, or be accepted as everlasting facts of an Eternal Moral Consciousness.

Shall we, then, say that the description which science gives of the constitution and working of the universe is indeed consistent and coherent enough with itself, and is a logical deduction from its premises, but to assert that it expresses or even corresponds to any reality beyond itself is a statement which we have no right to make? To take up this position is simply to maintain that science is consistent and logical, but that we have no reason or right to believe that it is true. If our accounts are based on imaginary figures, they may be kept as strictly as you please, but they will never show us our true position. Indeed, if our premises are incorrect to start with, the more logical our inferences are, the more certain our conclusions are to be wrong.

Shall we, then, say that the account which science gives of the cosmic process is not only consistent and logical, but expresses or corresponds to a reality? Then in that case the cosmic process, so far as it is truly expressed by science, is a logical process. But it is only a mind which can be logical or can go through a logical process. Once more, therefore, the facts of science as much as the facts of morality imply that the real is an Intelligence. In fine, the truth of science and the truth of morality are bound up together and have the same basis. If the one is valid for facts beyond the range of human observation, so is the other. If the one implies a consciousness other than human, equally so does the other.

It may be said that to regard the ruling principle of the cosmos as a moral agent is to commit the anthropomorphic fallacy. What, then, shall we say of science, which is engaged in demonstrating that the cosmic process is always logical? That science simply describes the facts as they are, and that if they are logical, it is not her fault? Then the presence of an intelligence other than human is revealed to science in the facts; and it is false to say that science merely imports her own intelligence into them. In the same way, the presence of a moral personality other than our own is revealed to us in the facts of conscience, and not imported into them by us. The presence of the Comforter is one of the facts apprehended by the religious consciousness; it is not merely the religious man's way of interpreting some other fact. From this conclusion the only way of escape is to say that anthropomorphism is a fallacy, and that it is a fallacy to which the human mind, by its very constitution, is always and inevitably subject. This argument gets rid at one blow of all indications of any intelligence or morality other than human. But how? Simply by begging the question, by tacitly taking it for granted that there is no other personality than human personality. In that case it is obvious, indeed, that man's perpetual discovery of personal power in the forces of nature, of more than human wisdom in nature's laws, and of more than human goodness in the human heart, is and must be fallacious. But only on the assumption that there is no wisdom in the world but man's, no love in all the universe but his, can we say that man reads into the facts a wisdom and a love which are not there. Are we, then, prepared to say that, in giving us a logical account of the cosmic process, science has—naturally and necessarily indeed, but none the less completely—been mistaken? If the scientific account corresponds to the facts, then the facts behave logically. If it is the anthropomorphic fallacy to imagine that things can behave logically, then science's description of the facts must be fallacious.

Perhaps it will be sought to save science by saying that science is anthropomorphic, but not fallacious. This, however, gives away the whole case: it is an admission that, in interpreting the cosmic process as a logical process, science is simply recognising, and rightly recognising, the logical character of the facts—the anthropomorphic interpretation happens to be right. But we must note that it is not right because it is anthropomorphic, but anthropomorphic because it faithfully describes the facts. Science aims at describing and formulating facts as they are: if the laws of science are rational, it is because she found reason already in the facts, and not because she put it there. She does not make the laws of nature, neither does she dictate the behaviour of facts, nor is their behaviour merely her way of interpreting facts. Man discovers in nature wisdom, which is an attribute of personality, not because he cannot help being anthropomorphic in his views, but because nature is a manifestation of the power and wisdom of a personality other and greater than man's. So far, then, is this discovery from creating a presumption that man makes nature after his own image, that it constitutes a proof that man is made in the image of that personal will and wisdom which is expressed in nature as well as manifested in man. In discovering personality we discover what is fundamentally real in nature, and for us what is fundamentally real is also our highest ideal.

We have already remarked that paradoxical though it sounds to say that the ideal is real, the seeming paradox does express a fact—the fact at once of our consciousness of the difference between what is and what ought to be, and of our conviction that what ought to be is no mere illusion. Truth and goodness, wisdom and love, are all at the same time ideal and real. The truth to which it is the ideal of science to approximate is no mere chimera. So far as it is truth, it is not merely man's way of looking at the facts or an interpretation which he puts upon them: it is a statement of the facts, as accurate and precise as science can make it. The ideal, being an ideal, will never be fully attained; but that the truth is there to be found out is proved every time science reaches a new truth, that is to say, a truth which before its discovery was indeed not apprehended by man, but certainly was not therefore either untrue or non-existent. The truth was in the facts; for what man knows of nature he has learnt from nature, and what he finds there is not the projection of human wisdom but the revelation of a more than human wisdom. Man's knowledge is real in proportion as it approaches the ideal. The ideal is not man's surmise, or vague conception, or anticipation of what he may hereafter come to know, for such surmises are always proved to be more or less erroneous. Neither is it man's conviction that the truth exists, if only he could find it out. It is actual truth and knowledge which now exist, and, being truth and knowledge, must exist in some mind, and certainly do not exist in man's mind. Science, so far as it has approached the ideal, has done so not by being anthropomorphic, but by ceasing to be anthropomorphic—that is to say, by casting aside presumptions of what according to man's notions ought to be or a priori must be, and substituting for such preconceptions a patient, reverent study of the facts as they are.

To regard the knowledge thus gained as being at once purely human and the only reality is to say that the evolution of the universe exists only in the speculation of human thinkers, and consequently that the world as it was before man existed was created by the speculation of minds which were not in existence then and which were only subsequently evolved. How can man have been evolved out of his own speculations? How can his speculations have existed before he did? Man owes his origin to the same Power whose wisdom is revealed in nature to science, and manifested to all in all around us. Of the existence of a Power, not ourselves, we have evidence in everything that affects us. It is a fact of consciousness, but it is a fact which from its very nature does not exist solely in our consciousness. Therein it resembles ideal wisdom or goodness, which exists in us, so far as our wisdom or goodness is real, but is far from being exhausted by its partial presence in us.

The ideal in morality, again, is not the mere desire to do good or to be good, just as the ideal in knowledge is not the mere desire to know the truth. And if goodness is the object of moral desire, as truth is the object of intellectual desire, in neither case is the object of desire purely imaginary, a mere idea or conception of something which might be, but as a matter of fact is not. We do not desire imaginary pleasures or imaginary goodness, we want the reality; and to tell us that that reality exists only in idea, only in our own imagination, is a misleading half-truth. True, we must have some idea of it, or else we could not desire it. But neither could we desire it if it were presented to us as purely imaginary. In other words, the object of moral desire is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as both actual and possible, as existing simultaneously for us and beyond us. The case is the same with ideal truth: we could not desire it, unless we had some conception of it, unless it were to some degree or in some way present to our consciousness; yet, at the same time, the knowledge which we desire to have but do not yet possess is certainly, so far as we do not possess it, beyond our consciousness. It is because we have not got it that we want it. And the object of desire, what we want, is not imaginary truth, but real truth; just as in our better moments we want to do not what we imagine to be right, but what is really right. The Real, therefore—real truth, real goodness—is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, and desired, at the moment of desire, as existing both for us and beyond us.

The proviso, "at the moment of apprehension, at the moment of desire," is important, because it strikes at the root of all forms of subjective idealism. They all assume that the only thing directly apprehended is what exists for us; that consequently the supposed existence of any real thing or person beyond us is a mere inference, and an inference the truth of which we have no means of checking, because it is a statement about things of which we have no direct apprehension or knowledge. On this assumption, therefore, the only things man directly apprehends are his own states of consciousness, his own sensations, etc. Are we to call them real or not? If they are not real, his whole life is a dream, his speculations fancies, and his desires illusions. If they are the only reality of which he can be certain, then the only truth is that which man knows, the only good is that which man does, the only world is that which man thinks, the only God is that which man makes, the magnified, non-natural shadow of man projected on to the mists of the Unknowable.

It is important, therefore, to insist that the Real—the reality of existence, of knowledge, of goodness—is not an inference, but a matter of direct apprehension. It is certain that goodness or knowledge to be an object of desire must be presented to us in idea; but it is equally certain that the mere idea is not what we desire. The object of desire is directly apprehended as in our consciousness and beyond it. The natural world around us is also directly apprehended as at once in our consciousness and beyond it: it is presented to our minds, but it is presented as real.

It is important also to note that the real does not forfeit its reality to our apprehension when and because it takes up its abode in us: goodness does not cease to be good because we do it, nor truth cease to be truth because we know it. It does not follow that because the ideal cannot be fully realised, it cannot be realised at all. On the contrary, the conviction that it cannot be completely attained is itself the guarantee that it can be attained partially. Yet it has been assumed that if a thing is apprehended by us it cannot be real, that real knowledge begins just where our knowledge ends, that the further we push our knowledge forward the further real knowledge recedes from our view. On this assumption is built the theory of the Unknowable, the theory that whatever is known to man is a state of man's consciousness; that states of consciousness are subjective, are merely the appearances of things, not the things themselves; that the real things, the things themselves, are unknowable; their appearances alone can be known to man; therefore the real is for ever unknowable. "The reality existing behind all appearances is, and must ever be, unknown."[4] Consequently, inferences about the Real are valueless and futile. By way of compensation, however, our knowledge of the unreal is, on this theory, varied and extensive: it includes, for instance, the theory of evolution and the whole of science.

But the assumption which leads to this strange conclusion is opposed to the facts. The fact, as we have contended, is that the real in consciousness is continuous with the real beyond consciousness, and is apprehended, at the moment of apprehension, as being thus continuous, and is not reached by any process of inference. The real is not a matter of inference, but of apprehension. Its existence cannot be deduced from anything else; it is that from which all conclusions must be deduced. I cannot prove that a thing is real any more than I can prove that I have toothache. There is no need.