IRRELE VANT TR UISMS ^ 3 



the non-perishable shall have been separated, and 

 they are being placed on the trains allotted to them, 

 the primary questions will be those of shape, weight, 

 and fragility. But so long as the preparatory 

 separation is in progress, to assert that the goods 

 possess any of these latter characteristics will be 

 wholly irrelevant, no matter how true. Boxes of 

 fish will not be put with book parcels because 

 neither of them are fragile, or because they are 

 both oblong ; and each characteristic, and every 

 classification based on it, will be either relevant or 

 irrelevant, full of meaning or meaningless, according 

 to what question, out of a considerable series, has 

 to be answered at the moment by the officials' who 

 superintend the business. 



And now let us go back to the two arguments 

 that are before us ; and we shall be prepared to see 

 how, though true for the speculative philosopher, 

 they have no meaning, or only a false meaning, for 

 .any practical man. 



We will first take that which is expressed with Thus the argu- 



. . - meat that the 



sufficient plainness in the passage quoted trom Mr. great man 

 Sidney Webb, and which insists on the great man's faculties 3 to his 



debt to society generally, not for his external circum- 

 stances, but for his personal character and capacities. 

 The idea involved in it is very easy to grasp. The which helped 



, . ... . . to develop his 



great man s congenital superiority is an inheritance ancestors, 

 from his superior ancestors ; but his ancestors would speculative 

 not have had it to hand on to him if they had not tn 

 been forced to develop such superiorities as they 

 possessed by exerting them in a competitive struggle 



