Now, valuation arranges experience in a different manner from natural science.  The attributes of reality, in our world of values, are Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.  And we assert that we have as good reason to claim objective reality for these Ideas as for anything in the world revealed to our senses.  ‘All claims on man’s behalf,’ says Professor Pringle-Pattison, ’must be based on the objectivity of the values revealed in his experience, and brokenly realised there.  Man does not make values any more than he makes reality.’  Our contention is that the world of values, which forms the content of idealistic thought and aspiration, is the real world; and in this world we find our own immortality.

But there could be no greater error than to leave the two worlds, or the two ‘judgments,’ that of existence and that of value, contrasted with each other, or treated as unrelated in our experience.  A value-judgment which is not also a judgment of existence is in the air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision.  Existence is itself a value, and an ingredient in every valuation; that which has no existence has no value.  And, on the other side, it is a delusion to suppose that any science can dispense with valuation.  Even mathematics admits that there is a right and a wrong way of solving a problem, though by confining itself to quantitative measurements it can assert no more than a hypothetical reality for its world.  It is quite certain that we can think of no existing world without valuation.

’The ultimate identity of existence and value is the venture of faith to which mysticism and speculative idealism are committed.’[93] It is indeed the presupposition of all philosophy and all religion; without this faith there can, properly speaking, be no belief in God.  But the difference between naturalism and idealism may, I think, be better stated otherwise than by emphasising the contrast between existence and value, which it is impossible for either side to maintain.  Naturalism seeks to interpret the world by investigation of origins; idealism by investigation of ends.  The one finds the explanation of evolution in that from which it started, the other in that to which it tends.  The one explains the higher by the lower; the other the lower by the higher.  This is a plain issue; either the world shows a teleology or it does not.  If it does, the philosophy based on the inorganic sciences is wrong.  And the attempt to explain the higher by the lower becomes mischievous or impossible when we pass from one order to another.  In speaking of different ‘orders,’ we do not commit ourselves to any sudden breaks or leaps in evolution.  The organic may be linked to the inorganic, soul to the lower forms of life, spirit to soul.  But whether the ‘scale of perfection’ is a ladder or an inclined plane, new categories are necessary as we ascend it.  And unless we admit an inner teleology as a determining factor in growth, many facts even in physiology are hard to explain.