NECESSARY TRUTHS— EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE. 675 



An adequate treatment of the way in wliicli we come by 

 our aesthetic and moral judgments would require a separate 

 cliajDter, wliicli I cannot conveniently include in this book. 

 Suffice it that these judgments express inner harmonies 

 and discords between objects of thought ; and that Avhilst 

 outer cohesions frequently repeated will often seem har- 

 monious, all harmonies are not thus engendered, but our 

 feeling of many of them is a secondary and incidental func- 

 tion of the mind. Where harmonies are asserted of the 

 real world, they are obviously mere postulates of ration- 

 ality, so far as they transcend experience. Such postulates 

 are exemplified by the ethical propositions that the indi- 

 vidual and universal good are one, and that happiness and 

 goodness are bound to coalesce in the same subject. 



SUMMARY OF WHAT PRECEDES. 



I will now sum up our progress so far by a short sum- 

 mary of the most important conclusions which we have 

 reached. 



tarian disputes, their loyalties aud patriotisms aud exclusions, — their an- 

 nals now become a classic heritage, because men of genius took part and 

 sang in them. A thing is important if any one tJimk it important. The 

 process of history consists in certain folks becoming possessed of the mania 

 that certain special things are important infinitely, whilst other folks can- 

 not agree in the belief. The Shah of Persia refused to be taken to the 

 Derby Day, saying " It is already known to me that one horse can run faster 

 than another." He made the question " which horse?" immaterial. Any 

 question can be made immaterial by subsuming all its answers under a 

 common head. Imagine what college ball-games and races would be if the 

 teams were to forget the absolute distinctness of Harvard from Yale and 

 think of both as One in the higher genus College. The sovereign road to 

 indifference, whether to evils or to goods, lies in the thought of the higher 

 genus. " When we have meat before us," says Marcus Aurelius, seeking 

 indifference to <^a< kird of good, "we must receive the impression that 

 tbis is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a 

 pig; and again that this Falernian is only a little grape-juice, and this pur- 

 pie robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shell-fish. Such, then, 

 are these impressions, and they reach the things themselves and penetrate 

 them, and we see what kind of things they are. Just in the same way 

 ought we to act through life, and where there are things which appear 

 most worthy of our approbation, we ought to lay them bare and look at 

 their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are ex- 

 alted." (Long's Translation, VI. 13.) 



