humanity and could discern what
facts and logic are good for and what not. The facts would remain facts
and the truths truths; for of course values, accruing on account of
animal souls and their affections, cannot possibly create the universe
those animals inhabit. But both facts and truths would remain trivial,
fit to awaken no pang, no interest, and no rapture. The first
philosophers were accordingly sages. They were statesmen and poets who
knew the world and cast a speculative glance at the heavens, the better
to understand the conditions and limits of human happiness. Before their
day, too, wisdom had spoken in proverbs. _It is better_ every adage
began: _Better this than that_. Images or symbols, mythical or homely
events, of course furnished subjects and provocations for these
judgments; but the residuum of all observation was a settled estimation
of things, a direction chosen in thought and life because it was better.
Such was philosophy in the beginning and such is philosophy still.

[Sidenote: Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.]

To one brought up in a sophisticated society, or in particular under an
ethical religion morality seems at first an external command, a chilling
and arbitrary set of requirements and prohibitions which the young
heart, if it trusted itself, would not reckon at a penny's worth. Yet
while this rebellion is brewing in the secret conclave of the passions,
the passions themselves are prescribing a code. They are inventing
gallantry and kindness and honour; they are discovering friendship and
paternity. With maturity comes the recognition that the authorised
precepts of morality were essentially not arbitrary; that they expressed
the genuine aims and interests of a practised will; that their alleged
alien and supernatural basis (which if real would have deprived them of
all moral authority) was but a mythical cover for their forgotten
natural springs. Virtue is then seen to be admirable essentially, and
not merely by conventional imputation. If traditional morality has much
in it that is out of proportion, much that is unintelligent and inert,
nevertheless it represents on the whole the verdict of reason. It speaks
for a typical human will chastened by a typical human experience.

[Sidenote: A choice of proverbs.]

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend
for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost
every wise saying ha