VALUES AND FINAL CAUSES 79 



Ptolemaic lies, not in its superior ease in working, but in 

 its greater utility for purposes of system and prophecy. 

 Without it there would have been no prospect of the great 

 advances in astronomical theory which have since been 

 made, or of our greatly increased accuracy in predicting 

 astronomical phenomena. Results of this kind are not to 

 be expected by a thinker who misrepresents his facts, or 

 distorts his theory in the interests of any end which is not 

 purely intellectual. The facts of external nature are, no 

 doubt, conditioned by our channels of communication with 

 the external world, or by a portion of what, in the most 

 general sense of the word, may be called our needs ; what 

 intellectual honesty demands is that they should be accepted 

 as so given us, and not coloured or transformed in compliance 

 with that class of our needs which may be distinguished 

 as our personal interests and aspirations. 



Of the utility, then, of intellectual honesty, there need be 

 no doubt. It is demonstrable. But the question of its 

 value is not so easily settled. The relative values of means 

 to ends, when compared with other classes of conduct as 

 means to other ends, depend exclusively on the relative 

 values of the ends ; and unless we know some universal end, 

 or summum bonum, to serve as a standard of comparison, 

 there is no way of demonstrating that one end is better than 

 another. And with reference to a universal end (notwith 

 standing the fact that there has always been a fair amount 

 of agreement as to values), there neither is, nor ever has been, 

 the slightest approach to agreement. We have, therefore, 

 a far greater certainty with regard to values themselves 

 than with regard to any possible explanation of them. 

 The concept of relative value necessarily implies the concept 

 of a further aim which is common to both the impulses 

 compared ; the concept of utility implies nothing but the 

 aim of a single impulse taken by itself. The second is a plain 

 fact, as to which no difference of opinion is possible ; as to 

 the first, men are not yet agreed whether it is to be placed 

 in this world or in another. 



Another point remains to be noted. The intellectual 



