doing with what is 'really' right.
Mr. Russell, in some of his later writings, seems to incline to views of
this sort. But the suggestion is really unmotived. It would be just as
reasonable to suggest that all geometrical or astronomical propositions
are only expressions of the personal and private feelings of geometers
and astronomers, and that either there is no distinction between truths
and falsehoods in geometry and astronomy, or that, at any rate, we do
not know which the true propositions are. That there is a real
distinction between true and false propositions and that, with pains and
care, we can discover some truths are assumptions we must make if we are
to recognize the possibility of pursuing knowledge at all, and there is
no reason to suppose that these assumptions do not hold as good in
matters of art and morals as elsewhere. No doubt, in practice men are
prone to mistake what they like for what is right or beautiful, but this
danger, such as it is, is not confined to art and morals. Men do often
call acts right merely because they like doing them or pictures
beautiful merely because they get pleasure from them. But it is also
notorious that many men are prone to believe that a thing is likely to
happen merely because they wish it to happen, or that it is unlikely to
happen merely because they wish it not to happen. Yet no one seriously
makes the reality of these tendencies a ground for denying the
possibility of 'inferring the future from the past'. We must then, I
hold, regard it as an integral part of the whole story of everything to
find an answer to the questions What is good? and What is beautiful? as
well as to the question What is fact? By the side of the so-called
'positive sciences', which deal with the third question, we must
recognize as having an equal right to exist the so-called 'sciences of
value', which deal with the first and the second.

I want now to take a further step in which disciples of Mr. Russell
would perhaps decline to follow me. We have already seen what is meant
by the co-ordination of the sciences into a single body of deductions
from definite ultimate postulates, though in what we have said about the
task we were content to speak provisionally as if the sciences of 'what
is' were all the sciences to be co-ordinated. We talked, in fact, as if
the work of Philosophy were merely to work into a coherent story all
that can be known of 'objects that present themselves to the
cont