the blind disposition to pursue that object, constitutes its
entire worth. Apart from the pains and satisfactions involved, an
impulse and its execution would be alike destitute of importance. It
would matter nothing how chaotic or how orderly the world became, or
what animal bodies arose or perished there; any tendencies afoot in
nature, whatever they might construct or dissolve, would involve no
progress or disaster, since no preferences would exist to pronounce one
eventual state of things better than another. These preferences are in
themselves, if the dynamic order alone be considered, works of
supererogation, expressing force but not producing it, like a statue of
Hercules; but the principle of such preferences, the force they express
and depend upon, is some mechanical impulse itself involved in the
causal process. Expression gives value to power, and the strength of
Hercules would have no virtue in it had it contributed nothing to art
and civilisation. That conceived basis of all life which we call matter
would be a mere potentiality, an inferred instrument deprived of its
function, if it did not actually issue in life and consciousness. What
gives the material world a legitimate status and perpetual pertinence in
human discourse is the conscious life it supports and carries in its own
direction, as a ship carries its passengers or rather as a passion
carries its hopes. Conscious interests first justify and moralise the
mechanisms they express. Eventual satisfactions, while their form and
possibility must be determined by animal tendencies, alone render these
tendencies vehicles of the good. The direction in which benefit shall
lie must be determined by irrational impulse, but the attainment of
benefit consists in crowning that impulse with its ideal achievement.
Nature dictates what men shall seek and prompts them to seek it; a
possibility of happiness is thus generated and only its fulfilment would
justify nature and man in their common venture.

[Sidenote: It is the seat of value.]

Satisfaction is the touchstone of value; without reference to it all
talk about good and evil, progress or decay, is merely confused
verbiage, pure sophistry in which the juggler adroitly withdraws
attention from what works the wonder--namely, that human and moral
colouring to which the terms he plays with owe whatever efficacy they
have. Metaphysicians sometimes so define the good as to make it a matter
of no importance; not sel