nt in a great accomplishment, which is the
discernment of the good. I have dwelt chiefly on this incident,
because in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true
philosophy that create controversy and form schools. Artificial
systems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their
adherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents,
and they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but
simply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims: so that the true
insight they were based on is too often buried under them. The
hypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the
forthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things
the limits and distinctions that divide them. So physics is corrupted
by logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and
when it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.
Mr. Russell's ethics _is_ ethics. When we mortals have once assumed
the moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to
some things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that
combinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and
that these valuable things are far more specific than abstract
pleasure, and far more diffused than one's personal life. What a pity
if this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth,
whose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a
tangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!

V

SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

It is possible to advocate anarchy in criticism as in politics, and
there is perhaps nothing coercive to urge against a man who maintains
that any work of art is good enough, intrinsically and incommensurably,
if it pleased anybody at any time for any reason. In practice, however,
the ideal of anarchy is unstable. Irrefutable by argument, it is readily
overcome by nature. It melts away before the dogmatic operation of the
anarchist's own will, as soon as he allows himself the least creative
endeavour. In spite of the infinite variety of what is merely possible,
human nature and will have a somewhat definite constitution, and only
what is harmonious with their actual constitution can long maintain
itself in the moral world. Hence it is a safe principle in the criticism
of art that technical proficiency, and brilliancy of fancy or execution,
cannot avail to establish a g