e
relation of knower to known is not the only relation in which he stands
to himself and to other things. The 'world' is not merely something at
which he can look on, it is also an instrument for achieving what he
regards as good and for creating what he judges to be beautiful. To do
good and to make beautiful things are just as much man's business as to
discover truth. A knowledge of the world would be very incomplete if it
did not include knowledge of what ought to be, whether because it is
morally best or because it is beautiful, as well as knowledge of what is
actually there. And it is not immediately evident how the two, knowledge
of what ought to be and knowledge of what merely is, are connected.

There is, to be sure, one way in which it is pretty plain that they are
_not_ related. You cannot learn what ought to be--what is beautiful or
morally good--merely by first finding out what has been or what is
likely to be. This simple consideration of itself deprives many of the
big volumes which have been written about the 'evolution' of art and
morals of most of their value. They may have interest if they are
treated only as contributions to the history of opinion about art and
morals. But unhappily their authors often assume that we can find out
what really _is_ right or beautiful by merely discovering what men have
thought right and beautiful in the remote past or guessing what they
will think right or beautiful in the distant future. The fallacy
underlying this procedure has been happily exposed by Mr. Russell
himself in an occasional essay where he remarks that it is antecedently
just as likely that evolution is going from bad to worse as that it is
going from good to better. _Unless_ it is going from bad to worse it is
obviously absurd to suppose that you can find out what _is_ good by
discovering what our distant ancestors _thought_ good. And _if_ (as may
be the case) it is going from bad to worse, no amount of knowledge about
what our posterity will think good can throw any light on the question
what is good. There is, in fact, no ground whatever for believing that
'evolution' need be the same thing as progress, and this is enough to
knock the bottom out of 'evolutionary ethics'.

On the other hand, it is quite certain that when we call an act right
or a picture beautiful we do not mean to be expressing a mere personal
liking of our own, any more than when we make a statement about the
composition of sulphuric