t disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This
human weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician
to appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said
that Englishmen called a certain object _bread_, and Frenchmen called
it _pain_, but that it really was _Brod_. Scholastic philosophy is
inclined to this way of asserting itself; and Mr. Russell, though he
candidly admits that there are ultimate differences of opinion about
good and evil, would gladly minimise these differences, and thinks he
triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree
with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals,
supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to
recognise was independent of their constitution.

In a somewhat worthier sense, however, we may admit that there are
desires for what is bad, since desire and will, in the proper
psychological sense of these words, are incidental phases of
consciousness, expressing but not constituting those natural relations
that make one thing good for another. At the same time the words
desire and will are often used, in a mythical or transcendental sense,
for those material dispositions and instincts by which vital and moral
units are constituted. It is in reference to such constitutional
interests that things are "really" good or bad; interests which may
not be fairly represented by any incidental conscious desire. No doubt
any desire, however capricious, represents some momentary and partial
interest, which lends to its objects a certain real and inalienable
value; yet when we consider, as we do in human society, the interests
of men, whom reflection and settled purposes have raised more or less
to the ideal dignity of individuals, then passing fancies and passions
may indeed have bad objects, and be bad themselves, in that they
thwart the more comprehensive interests of the soul that entertains
them. Food and poison are such only relatively, and in view of
particular bodies, and the same material thing may be food and poison
at once; the child, and even the doctor, may easily mistake one for
the other. For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating
than coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a
strange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to
insist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference
to any animal; that it is pe