ng upon us from the heights of another world: one who
should have learned the aim of the universe and the destiny of man. In
the meanwhile, if we say that Nature is right, we say that the instinct
of justice, which she has placed in us, and which therefore also is
nature, is wrong; whereas if we approve this instinct, our approval is
necessarily derived from the exercise of the very faculty that is
called in question.

21

That is true; but it is no less true that the endeavour to sum up the
world in a syllogism is one of the oldest and vainest habits of man.
In the region of the unknown and unknowable, logic-chopping has its
perils; and in the present case all our doubts would seem to arise from
another hazardous syllogism. We tell ourselves--boldly at times, but
more often in a whisper--that we are Nature's children, and bound
therefore in all things to conform to her laws and copy her example.
And since Nature regards justice with indifference, since she has
another aim, which is the sustaining, the renewing, the incessant
development of life, it follows. . . . So far we have not formulated
the conclusion, or, at least, this conclusion has not yet openly dared
to force its way into our morality; but, although its influence has
hitherto only been remotely felt in that familiar sphere which includes
our relations, our friends, and our immediate surroundings, it is
slowly penetrating into the vast and desolate region whither we
relegate all those whom we know not and see not, who for us have no
name. It is already to be found at the root of many of our actions; it
has entered our politics, our industry, our commerce; indeed it affects
almost all we do from the moment we emerge from the narrow circle of
our domestic hearth, the only place for the majority of men where a
little veritable justice is still to be found, a little benevolence, a
little love. It will call itself economic or social law, evolution,
competition, struggle for life; it will masquerade under a thousand
names, forever perpetrating the selfsame wrong. And yet nothing can be
less legitimate than such a conclusion. Apart from the fact that we
might with equal justification reverse the syllogism, and cause it to
declare that there must be a certain justice in Nature, since we, her
children, are just, we need only consider it as it stands to realise
how doubtful and contestable is at least one of its premisses.

We have seen in the preceding ch