he puts himself in the same position as Mr. Moore, who feels a similar conviction about the goodness of his towards the Truth.  If Mr. Moore is to infer the goodness of one state of mind from his feelings, why should not someone else infer the goodness of another from his?  The Cambridge rationalists have a short way with such dissenters.  They simply assure them that they do not feel what they say they feel.  Some of them have begun to apply their cogent methods to aesthetics; and when we tell them what we feel for pure form they assure us that, in fact, we feel nothing of the sort.  This argument, however, has always struck me as lacking in subtlety.

Much as he dislikes mentioning the fact or hearing it mentioned, the common man of science recognises no other end in life than protracted and agreeable existence.  That is where he joins issue with the religious; it is also his excuse for being a eugenist.  He declines to believe in any reality other than that of the physical universe.  On that reality he insists dogmatically.[7] Man, he says, is an animal who, like other animals, desires to live; he is provided with senses, and these, like other animals, he seeks to gratify:  in these facts he bids us find an explanation of all human aspiration.  Man wants to live and he wants to have a good time; to compass these ends he has devised an elaborate machinery.  All emotion, says the common man of science, must ultimately be traced to the senses.  All moral, religious and aesthetic emotions are derived from physical needs, just as political ideas are based on that gregarious instinct which is simply the result of a desire to live long and to live in comfort.  We obey the by-law that forbids us to ride a bicycle on the footpath, because we see that, in the long run, such a law is conducive to continued and agreeable existence, and for very similar reasons, says the man of science, we approve of magnanimous characters and sublime works of art.

“Not so,” reply saints, artists, Cambridge rationalists, and all the better sort; for they feel that their religious, aesthetic, or moral emotions are not conditioned, directly or indirectly, by physical needs, nor, indeed, by anything in the physical universe.  Some things, they feel, are good, not because they are means to physical well-being, but because they are good in themselves.  In nowise does the value of aesthetic or religious rapture depend upon the physical satisfaction it affords.  There are things in life the worth of which cannot be related to the physical universe,—­things of which the worth is not relative but absolute.  Of these matters I speak cautiously and without authority:  for my immediate purpose—­to present my conception of the religious character—­I need say only that to some the materialistic conception of the universe does not seem to explain those emotions which they feel with supreme certainty and absolute disinterestedness.  The fact is, men of science, having got us into the habit of attempting to justify all our feelings and states of mind by reference to the physical universe, have almost bullied some of us into believing that what cannot be so justified does not exist.