logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or
subtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the
connection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable
predicate, and the specific quality of it can be given only in
intuition; but it is a quality that things acquire under certain
conditions, so much so that the same bit of grass, at the same moment,
may have it from one point of view and not from another. Right and
left are indefinable; the difference could not be explained without
being invoked in the explanation; yet everything that is to the right
is not to the right on no condition, but obviously on the condition
that some one is looking in a certain direction; and if some one else
at the same time is looking in the opposite direction, what is truly
to the right will be truly to the left also. If Mr. Russell thinks
this is a contradiction, I understand why the universe does not
please him. The contradiction would be real, undoubtedly, if we
suggested that the idea of good was at any time or in any relation the
idea of evil, or the intuition of right that of left, or the quality
of green that of yellow; these disembodied essences are fixed by the
intent that selects them, and in that ideal realm they can never have
any relations except the dialectical ones implied in their nature, and
these relations they must always retain. But the contradiction
disappears when, instead of considering the qualities in themselves,
we consider the things of which those qualities are aspects; for the
qualities of things are not compacted by implication, but are
conjoined irrationally by nature, as she will; and the same thing may
be, and is, at once yellow and green, to the left and to the right,
good and evil, many and one, large and small; and whatever verbal
paradox there may be in this way of speaking (for from the point of
view of nature it is natural enough) had been thoroughly explained and
talked out by the time of Plato, who complained that people should
still raise a difficulty so trite and exploded.[8] Indeed, while
square is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may
actually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to
be a cylinder.

[Footnote 8: Plato, _Philebus_, 14, D. The dialectical element in this
dialogue is evidently the basis of Mr. Russell's, as of Mr. Moore's,
ethics; but they have not adopted the other elements in it, I mean the
political and the