til one has tried all ways of solution and found them
_culs-de-sac_. If we are to be thoroughly loyal to the spirit which
prompts all intelligent inquiry, we are bound at least to ask whether
it is, after all, beyond the power of human intelligence to think of the
world as a system in which somehow, in the end, what ought to be
prescribes what is. It is true that, for reasons already mentioned, we
cannot, like Spinoza or the Sufis, reconcile facts and values by the
simple assumption that what is is shown, by the fact that it is, to be
what ought to be, and that our common conviction that sin and ugliness
are painfully real is only an illusion due to spiritual short sight. We
have just as much reason to believe that some pleasures are good, that
pain which is not a means to good is evil, that justice and purity are
good, lewdness and cruelty bad, that some colours are lovely and others
odious, as we have to believe that between any two points there is
always a third, or that, if _B_ and _C_ are two points there is always a
point _D_ on the straight line _BC_ such that _C_ is between _B_ and
_D_, and a point _A_ on _CB_ such that _B_ is between _C_ and _A_.
Indeed, the most fanatical champion of what Mr. Russell in his
anti-ethical mood calls 'ethical neutrality' cannot well avoid
recognizing the truth of at least one proposition in ethics, the
proposition that knowledge of scientific truth is _better_ than
ignorance of it. The admission of this single truth of value is enough
to raise all the time-honoured problems of ethics and theodicy. If
knowledge of truth is better than ignorance of it, the actual present
state of the world, in which so much truth is yet to seek, is by no
means wholly good, and there really is at least one way in which it is
our duty to make it more like what it ought to be.

If then we cannot get rid of the apparent conflict between Is and Ought
by saying that Ought is an illusion, can we get rid of it, in the only
other possible way, by holding that what ought to be is the lasting and
primary reality and that the 'facts' which are so far from being what
they ought to be are by comparison only half-real, much what shadows are
to the solid things which throw them? This was the doctrine of Plato,
who makes Socrates say in the _Phaedo_ that it is the 'Good' which holds
the Universe together, and that in the end the true reason for each
particular arrangement in the world, whether we can see it or not,