irreligious Faith in God. Faith, we may perhaps say, is a realist, as ascribing reality to ideas, but an idealist, since it is ideas to which it ascribes reality.

Now on what principles do we construct our world of values? Why do we prefer some things above others? What qualities give or involve intrinsic worth? Our answers to these questions will determine the whole character of our Faith, and our whole judgment as to the meaning and content of Faith generally.

The simplest and lowest standard of valuation is that of pleasure and pain. This has very little to do with Faith, because it is almost entirely subjective and particular. Sensuous perceptions do not point to any universal beyond themselves. We are conscious of no contradiction, no problem clamouring for solution, when we acknowledge that 'tastes differ '-even when they differ so much that one man's meat is another man's poison. We cannot argue with any confidence from pleasure and pain to the objective value or nature of things. All we can say is that pleasure is the frequent (not the universal) accompaniment of right action and of a healthy condition, and pain of wrong-doing and disease. Pleasure and pain have thus (in Kantian language, though in opposition to Kantian theory) some degree of regulative value; they have not a constitutive value. And their regulative value, their usefulness in apprising us whether we are doing well or badly, is not that of an infallible criterion.

If we reject the pleasure and pain calculus, not as worthless, but as belonging to an inferior, subsidiary class, we shall find, I think, that there are three attributes of things which have an absolute, intrinsic value. They are constitutive, not regulative principles of reality regarded as spiritual.

First, we value what is universally true, and we arrange our experience in order of value, according as it illustrates, more or less, universal truth. We value law above acci

dent, or what we call accident; we value the rule above the exception; more decidedly, we value fact above fiction, our waking life above our dreams. Our thoughts are valuable, or worthless, according as they correspond with, or contradict, the actual nature of things. A theory is valuable if it explains or accounts for a great number of phenomena. A religion or philosophy is valuable if it gives an intelligible explanation or a plausible theory of the constitution of the universe and the laws of human nature. Whenever we succeed in establishing the correspondence of idea with fact, we feel that we are enriched; we have gained something which is valuable for its own sake.

I shall have, in the course of these lectures, to defend this conception of truth against the sceptical subjectivism which denies that our thoughts can ever convey to us genuine knowledge of reality external to ourselves. I will not argue the question in this place, but will only say that my position is a 'moderate realism.' I believe that we are in contact with external reality, and that we may trust our faculties when they tell us (as they do with the utmost emphasis) that our knowledge is not merely of our own mental states, but of facts which exist independently of our mental states. At the same time, I hold that this confidence is a matter of reasonable Faith, and can never, from the nature of the case, be anything more.

Secondly, we attach an absolute, intrinsic value to what we call moral goodness. However we came by it, we are in possession of the category of the ought-to-be, the partly unrealised supplement of given experience. The greater part of our experience is capable of being arranged on a scale of ethical values. We may, if we choose, for the sake of greater clearness in ethical study, abstract from other aspects of reality, and regard the world simply as a place where some things are morally good, and others morally bad. We may picture to ourselves human life as simply and solely a school of character, a place of moral discipline.

And if we are asked, 'Why is this or that called good? we must not answer, 'Because it promotes the interest of the whole,' or 'Because it leads to the greatest happiness,' or anything of that kind. If we do, the Positivist will prove to us that the 'Good' is, by our own admission, only a means to an end, or only relative, or only determined by public opinion. The Good cannot be made an instrument of pleasure and pain, though utilitarianism has subjected it to this degradation; nor can it be subordinated to the True and the Beautiful, any more than they to it. The form of the moral standard, 'You must,' is essential as well as the content. It is clearly a law of our being; we point to it as a magnetic needle points to the North.

In a later lecture I shall have to deal with the exclusive authority attached by some philosophers to the moral sense. I do not agree that the categorical imperative' belongs to moral judgments only, in such a way as to make a generic difference between them and intellectual or æsthetic judgments. The peremptory command, 'You must take account of this,' is not always the voice of conscience. It is the mark of all reality, and it compels our attention to the true and the beautiful in the same masterful tone as to the ethical demand. The contrary impression has arisen from the fact that the moral imperative usually prompts to some external act, which for a superficial view is more 'real' than a change of mind or feeling.

The third order of values, which, though with the majority of men it holds a subordinate place, is quite incapable of being reduced to subjection to either of the other two, is the quality of Beauty. When we say that a thing is beautiful, we mean that it is objectively, universally beautiful, not that it gives us pleasure to look at it. The aesthetic sense is more than an instrument of pleasure. We cannot speak of pleasure or pain without immediate reference to individual feelings, from which there is no appeal, but we regard it as a defect in others if they cannot

see beauty in what we admire. We believe that the laws of beauty reign in the real world; and this for the Theist implies that the Creator values beauty for its own sake. In natural history, we see that aesthetic perceptions determine choice in the case of creatures quite low down in the scale; Darwin and others have shown what elaborate and exquisite adornments Nature provides for beasts, birds, and insects, decorations which have no other object than to attract mates by appealing to their highly developed sense of beauty. Personally I have no doubt that many of the unsatisfactory features in our civilisation are due to the fact that we see nothing wrong in unnecessary ugliness, and so continually affront the Creator by disregarding one of His primary attributes.

The essence of beauty seems to be the suitableness of form to idea. A beautiful object is perhaps always valued as the just translation of an idea into expressive form. When Aristotle said that the primary necessity for a poet is to be good at metaphors (using 'metaphor' in the widest possible sense), he spoke the truth. There is a low but positive degree of beauty in mere symmetry, which is a symbolical expression of the order, proportion, and uniformity of Nature-the ráĝis and répas which, according to Plotinus's scheme, we are to begin by learning, through the study of Nature. Subtler harmonies, which express and interpret, we know not how, the deeper and more complex secrets of life, have a higher value as beautiful things. A beautiful face and person attract us because they are the index of a healthy body, a sound mind, and a fine character. Rising higher still, there is beauty of thought, of feeling, and of action. A man's life may, as Milton says, be a true poem. And ugliness is always, I think, essentially discord between form and idea. The ugliest thing in Nature, a human face distorted by evil passions, is hideous because the face is that of a man made in the image of God, a sharer in the humanity redeemed by Christ.

The discord here becomes revolting. The ugliness of vulgarity, in all its forms, is caused by the inappropriateness of form to content, or the juxtaposition of incompatibles. It is the misuse of symbols by those who do not understand them. We have, then, three schemes of value,-truth, goodness,and beauty, which cannot be reduced to each other. They are the three aspects under which the life of God is known to us. They are not independent of each other; beauty cannot fall entirely out of relation to truth or goodness without ceasing to be beautiful, as the history of decadence in art has proved again and again. Neither can morality wholly forget the claims of truth or beauty, as the history of Jesuitism and of Puritanism respectively should have taught us. Neither can metaphysics despise the ethical and æsthetic ideals without falling into falsehood; for though science may rightly and honourably accept limitations and consent to a partial and one-sided view, since it does not profess to guide us to absolute truth, philosophy, which is the quest of universal truth, is bound to leave nothing out.

I hope you will agree with me in regarding these three lines of revelation as distinct without being separate, and as constituting, collectively, what we may call natural revelation.

So the poets have taught us. Goethe (translated by Carlyle) thus asserts their triune harmony :

As all nature's myriad changes

Still one changeless power proclaim,

So through thought's wide kingdom ranges
One vast meaning, e'er the same:

This is Truth-eternal Reason

That in Beauty takes its dress,

And, serene through time and season,
Stands complete in Righteousness.

1 Lotze says that they are given intuitively, and thus have a certainty which cannot belong to mental concepts.

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