RELIGION AND SCIENCE 259 



Natural beauty comes to have its value too ; a cow 

 (so far as known !) does not interrupt the business 

 of its life to admire the sunset, whereas men may 

 and do. Behaviour also is implicated ; with the 

 entry upon the scene of that practically unlimited 

 number of possible reactions which give us what 

 we call free will and choice, there comes a conviction 

 that some modes of action are higher than others ; 

 and so a scale of moral values comes into being.^ 



Nor is it merely that values, in the strict sense, 

 are created ; nor that new values come into being. 

 But with the enlargement of mind and its more 

 perfect organization, there arises a new method of 

 appraising values, and so a new type of value alto- 

 gether. I mean of course the so-called absolute 

 values. Absolute values are never absolute in the 

 sense of absolute completeness ; they are relative 

 to two things — to external reality and to our mental 

 powers and organization. ^ They are abstractions ; 

 we generalize the value in our minds, and at the 

 same time raise it to the highest pitch of intensity 



1 See Haldane, '21 j Thouless, '23. 



' A confusion of thought easily arises here. It may be 

 absolutely true that 2 and 2 make 4 j we may be absolutely 

 right in certain cases to tell a lie j or may find an expression of 

 absolute beauty in some one lovely thing. But we may grow 

 to find that same thing aesthetically unsatisfying ; we can 

 imagine a state of society in which it would never be right to 

 lie ; while our correct knowledge of elementary arithmetic is 

 something very partial and incomplete considered in relation to 

 mathematical truth as a whole. 



