natural history, the facts or estimations
classed under that head need to be referred instead to one of two other
principles--either to mechanical equilibrium and habit, or to
dialectical consistency in judgment.

Self-preservation might express, perhaps, the values which conceived
events acquire in respect to a given attitude of will, to an arrested
momentary ideal. The actual state of any animal, his given instincts and
tensions, are undoubtedly the point of origin from which all changes and
relations are morally estimated; and if this attitude is afterward
itself subjected to estimation, that occurs by virtue of its affinity or
conflict with the living will of another moment. Valuation is
dialectical, not descriptive, nor contemplative of a natural process. It
might accordingly be developed by seeing what is implied in the
self-preservation, or rather expression, of a will which by that
dialectic would discover its ideal scope.

Such a principle, however, could never explain the lapse of that
attitude itself. A natural process cannot be governed by the ideal
relations which conceived things acquire by being represented in one of
its moments. Spinoza, however, let himself wander into this path and
made the semblance of an attempt, indeed not very deceptive, to trace
the sequence of feelings by their mutual implication. The changes in
life were to be explained by what the crystallised posture of life might
be at a single instant. The arrow's flight was to be deduced from its
instantaneous position. A passion's history was to be the history of
what would have been its expression if it had had no history at all.

[Sidenote: A principle of estimation cannot govern events.]

A man suffered by destiny to maintain for ever a single unchanged
emotion might indeed think out its multifarious implications much in
Spinoza's way. It is in that fashion that parties and sects, when
somewhat stable, come to define their affinities and to know their
friends and enemies all over the universe of discourse. Suppose, for
instance, that I feel some titillation on reading a proposition
concerning the contrast between Paul's idea of Peter and Peter's idea of
himself, a titillation which is accompanied by the idea of Spinoza, its
external cause. Now he who loves an effect must proportionately love
its cause, and titillation accompanied by the idea of its external cause
is, Spinoza has proved, what men call love. I therefore find that I lov