When a man has decided on a course of action,
it is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that he is sure that
course is absolutely right. His moral dogma expresses its natural
origin all the more clearly the more hotly it is proclaimed; and
ethical absolutism, being a mental grimace of passion, refutes what it
says by what it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the
philosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe the conviction
that what is beautiful or precious has not thereby any right to
existence; nothing has such a right; nor is it given us to condemn
absolutely any force--god or man--that destroys what is beautiful or
precious, for it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its
own to achieve.
The consequences of a hypostasis of the good are no less interesting
than its causes. If the good were independent of nature, it might
still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or
mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates;
his good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long
help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a
mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is
natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been
projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should
attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world
is aiming at.
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