Note 257 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have thought of as the “radical vice of all goodness”—its tendency to forget that other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as absolute “values,” as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking of here is simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace, when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of the heavens (impavidum ferient ruinae) or by the idea of the Stoic sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.