We may
assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we
may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different
preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr.
Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great
advance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded
as hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or
beans, or frogs' legs, or who had a weakness for anything called
"unnatural"; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts
that intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and _par
excellence_, abominations.
I am not sure whether Mr. Russell thinks he has disposed of this view
where he discusses the proposition that the good is the desired and
refutes it on the ground that "it is commonly admitted that there are
bad desires; and when people speak of bad desires, they seem to mean
desires for what is bad." Most people undoubtedly call desires bad
when they are generically contrary to their own desires, and call
objects that disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This
human weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician
to appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said
that Englishmen called a certain object _bread_, and Frenchmen called
it _pain_, but that it really was _Brod_.
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