at, in
the very act of recognising excellence and pursuing it, we may glance
back over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned,
and what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward
look, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical
self-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to
deny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all
their purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard
more of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic
entanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be
more recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of
Messrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a
logician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine,
though correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing
outlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things.
We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full
image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that
perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is
moral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and
fanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for
the matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilised leaning towards the
doctrine of retributive punishment, or in Mr. Russell's intolerance
of selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any
pious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like
that of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a
moral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the
function of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we
wish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly
the aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with
what is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false
place, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal.
However, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to
confuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true
mind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help
us, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.

In the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's
doctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my
comprehension), and t