VALUES AND FINAL CAUSES 97 



are several patent objections. In the first place, it falls 

 short of being a final explanation. It immediately suggests 

 the question, Why should the species be preserved ? If it 

 is perfect now, the end of nature has already been achieved ; 

 if it is preserved in order that it may be perfected, then 

 perfection, and not preservation, is the end of nature, and 

 our problem remains unsolved ; we have still to discover 

 what is perfection. It is not to be attained by the elimina 

 tion of all that we regard as undesirable. Few men, and 

 those not the best, would prefer an existence free from care, 

 from discord, and from all forms of unhappiness, where all 

 aspirations for something better were dead, to the present 

 state of conflict, and occasional hard-won triumph. More 

 over, the operations with which nature makes us acquainted 

 are destructive rather than preservative, and the higher the 

 race is in the scale of creation, the shorter, as a rule, has been 

 its appearance on the stage of life. 



We must at this point return to the concept of values, 

 and inquire whether it is possible to detect some principle 

 by which their relative estimation may be accounted for. 

 The first fact that forces itself on our attention is that they 

 are not the principles which usually govern human conduct. 

 Our beliefs in this connexion cannot be defined as what 

 we are ready to take action on. That we value one line of 

 conduct and adopt another, is one of the oldest and most 

 obvious topics of ethical observation. So far is it from 

 being the case that we pursue what we value highest, that 

 a man is esteemed a hero if he merely attempts to conform 

 his life to those values, and more than a hero if he succeeds. 

 Ordinary conduct is guided by principles which are univer 

 sally admitted to be of little value, or none, or less than 

 none. To assert that worth is wholly relative to the tem 

 porary interests of the conceiver, contradicts the plainest 

 facts of our experience, and is an exact inversion of the 

 truth. 



The first step in a critique of value will be to distinguish 

 between the petty values which govern the details of daily 

 life the values of the tea-table and the railway journey 



BENETT O 



