eral
human relations and attitude. And in regard to all these matters
affecting our personal motives, our self-control and our devotions, it
is much truer.

From this it is an easy step to the statement that so far as the
clear-cut confident sort of knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one
gets from a time-table or a text-book of chemistry, or seeks from a
witness in a police court, I am, in relation to religious and moral
questions an agnostic. I do not think any general propositions partaking
largely of the nature of fact can be known about these things. There is
nothing possessing the general validity of fact to be stated or known.

1.11. BELIEFS.

Yet it is of urgent practical necessity that we should have such
propositions and beliefs. All those we conjure out of our mental
apparatus and the world of fact dissolve and disappear again under
scrutiny. It is clear we must resort to some other method for these
necessities.

Now I make my beliefs as I want them. I do not attempt to distil them
out of fact as physicists distil their laws. I make them thus and not
thus exactly as an artist makes a picture so and not so. I believe that
is how we all make our beliefs, but that many people do not see this
clearly and confuse their beliefs with perceived and proven fact.

I draw my beliefs exactly as an artist draws lines to make a picture, to
express my impression of the world and my purpose.

The artist cannot defend his expression as a scientific man defends his,
and demonstrate that they are true upon any assumptions whatsoever.
Any loud fool may stand in front of a picture and call it inaccurate,
untrustworthy, unbeautiful. That last, the most vital issue of all, is
the one least assured. Loud fools always do do that sort of thing. Take
quite ignorant people before almost any beautiful work of art and they
will laugh at it as absurd. If one sits on a popular evening in that
long room at South Kensington which contains Raphael's cartoons, one
remarks that perhaps a third of those who stray through and look at all
those fine efforts, titter. If one searches in the magazines of a
little while ago, one finds in the angry and resentful reception of the
Pre-Raphaelites another instance of the absolutely indefensible nature
of many of the most beautiful propositions. And as a still more striking
and remarkable case, take the onslaught made by Ruskin upon the works
of Whistler. You will remember that a libel acti