s and the butter and the syrup seldom
come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view
them with scientific suspicion if they did.

IX.

_Moral questions_ immediately present themselves as questions whose
solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a
question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be
good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare
the _worths_, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must
consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself
consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite
ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme
goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it
oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and
correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
them is decided by {23} our will. Are our moral preferences true or
false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
bad for _us_, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure
intellect decide? If your heart does not _want_ a world of moral
reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.
Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's
play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men
(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the
moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their
supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill
at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete
and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he
clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which
(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no
better than the cunning of a fox. Moral scepticism can no more be
refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we
stick to it that there _is_ truth (be it of either kind), we do so with
our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The
sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which
of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of
questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of