ENDS AND MEANS
ness. But it is a matter of brute empirical fact that, in the
world of phenomena, the most virtuous are not necessarily
the happiest, and that the rational will is not always that
which gets itself done. It follows therefore that the union
of virtue and happiness, without which the highest good
cannot be realized, must be effected by some power external
to ourselves, a power which so arranges things that, what-
ever partial and temporary appearance may be, the total
world order is moral and demonstrates the union of virtue
with happiness.
Those who oppose this argument do so, first, on the
ground that it is merely a piece of 'wishful thinking,' and,
second, that words Kke 'virtue/ 'the good' and all the rest
have no definite meaning, but change from one community
to another.
We discredit thoughts which have wishes as their fathers;
and in very many circumstances, we are certainly right in
doing so. But there are certain circumstances in which
wishes are a reliable source of information, not only about
ourselves, but also about the outside world. From the
premiss, for example, of thirst we are justified in arguing the
existence of something which can satisfy thirst. Nor is it
only in the phenomenal world-that such wishful arguments
have validity. "We have, as I have pointed out in an earlier
paragraph, a craving for explanation. This craving is satis-
fied by the reduction of diversity to identity, so much so
that any theory which postulates the existence of identity
behind diversity seems to us intrinsically plausible. Like
philosophy and religion, science is an Attempt systematic-
ally to satisfy the craving for explanation iri terms of
theories which seem plausible because they postulate the
existence of identity behind diversity. But here an interest-
ing and highly significant fact emerges: observation and
experiment seem to demonstrate that what the human mind
regards as intrinsically plausible is in fact true and that the
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