tion and
history of things is good for this reason. It is also good because of
the enlarged horizon it gives us, because the spectacle of nature is
a marvellous and fascinating one, full of a serious sadness and
large peace, which gives us back our birthright as children of the
planet and naturalizes us upon the earth. This is the poetic value of
the scientific _Weltanschauung._ From these two benefits, the
practical and the imaginative, all the value of truth is derived.

Aesthetic and moral judgments are accordingly to be classed
together in contrast to judgments intellectual; they are both
judgments of value, while intellectual judgments are judgments of
fact. If the latter have any value, it is only derivative, and our
whole intellectual life has its only justification in its connexion
with our pleasures and pains.

_Contrast between moral and aesthetic values._

Sec. 3. The relation between aesthetic and moral judgments, between
the spheres of the beautiful and the good, is close, but the
distinction between them is important. One factor of this
distinction is that while aesthetic judgments are mainly positive,
that is, perceptions of good, moral judgments are mainly and
fundamentally negative, or perceptions of evil. Another factor of
the distinction is that whereas, in the perception of beauty, our
judgment is necessarily intrinsic and based on the character of the
immediate experience, and never consciously on the idea of an
eventual utility in the object, judgments about moral worth, on the
contrary, are always based, when they are positive, upon the
consciousness of benefits probably involved. Both these
distinctions need some elucidation.

Hedonistic ethics have always had to struggle against the moral
sense of mankind. Earnest minds, that feel the weight and dignity
of life, rebel against the assertion that the aim of right conduct is
enjoyment. Pleasure usually appears to them as a temptation, and
they sometimes go so far as to make avoidance of it a virtue. The
truth is that morality is not mainly concerned with the attainment
of pleasure; it is rather concerned, in all its deeper and more
authoritative maxims, with the prevention of suffering. There is
something artificial in the deliberate pursuit of pleasure; there is
something absurd in the obligation to enjoy oneself. We feel no
duty in that direction; we take to enjoyment naturally enough after
the work of life is done, and the freedom and spon