owever, is not
interpretation, and the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is to
trace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognise their
own fatuity. The most irresponsible vision has certain principles of
order and valuation by which it estimates itself; and in these
principles the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting may
be its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the
Israelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that
dream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden
egg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science.

[Sidenote: Intrinsic pleasure in existence.]

[Sidenote: Pleasure a good,]

Visionary experience has a first value in its possible pleasantness. Why
any form of feeling should be delightful is not to be explained
transcendentally: a physiological law may, after the fact, render every
instance predictable; but no logical affinity between the formal quality
of an experience and the impulse to welcome it will thereby be
disclosed. We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain states of
mind and pain others; which is another way of saying that, for no
reason, we love the first and detest the second. The polemic which
certain moralists have waged against pleasure and in favour of pain is
intelligible when we remember that their chief interest is edification,
and that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a valuable virtue
in a world where action and renunciation are the twin keys to happiness.
But to deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque
affectation: it amounts to giving "good" and "evil" artificial
definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. Not only
is good that adherence of the will to experience of which pleasure is
the basal example, and evil the corresponding rejection which is the
very essence of pain, but when we pass from good and evil in sense to
their highest embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and pain something
which it is a duty to prevent. A man who without necessity deprived any
person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible
knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor
could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that
sentence. For it suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhors
anything, no matter how slightly, for that thing to acquire a
proportionate value which