use; it is the efficacious structure and
skeleton of things. This is the subject of scientific retrospect and
calculation. The forces disclosed by physical studies are of course not
directed to producing a mind that might merely describe them. A force is
expressed in many other ways than by being defined; it may be felt,
resisted, embodied, transformed, or symbolised. Forces work; they are
not, like mathematical concepts, exhausted in description. From that
matter which might be describable in mechanical formulae there issue
notwithstanding all manner of forms and harmonies, visible, audible,
imaginable, and passionately prized. Every phase of the ideal world
emanates from the natural and loudly proclaims its origin by the
interest it takes in natural existences, of which it gives a rational
interpretation. Sense, art, religion, society, express nature
exuberantly and in symbols long before science is added to represent, by
a different abstraction, the mechanism which nature contains.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: Aristippus asked Socrates "whether he knew anything good,
so that if he answered by naming food or drink or money or health or
strength or valour or anything of that sort, he might at once show that
it was sometimes an evil. Socrates, however, knew very well that if
anything troubles us what we demand is its cure, and he replied in the
most pertinent fashion. 'Are you asking me,' he said, 'if I know
anything good for a fever?' 'Oh, no,' said the other. 'Or for sore
eyes?' 'Not that, either.' 'Or for hunger?' 'No, not for hunger.' 'Well,
then,' said he, 'if you ask me whether I know a good that is good for
nothing, I neither know it nor want to know it'"--Xenophon, Memorabilia,
iii., 8.]

CHAPTER X--THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION

[Sidenote: Honesty in hedonism.]

To put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given quantity of pain as
balancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to bring to practical ethics
a worthy intention to be clear and, what is more precious, an undoubted
honesty not always found in those moralists who maintain the opposite
opinion and care more for edification than for truth. For in spite of
all logical and psychological scruples, conduct that should not justify
itself somehow by the satisfactions secured and the pains avoided would
not justify itself at all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desire
is forthwith chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be a
pr