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This great fallacy once overthrown which governs more or less the German logics, what does right reasoning consist in? It consists in such reasoning as shall be conducive to our ultimate aim. What then is our ultimate aim? Perhaps it is not necessary that the logician should answer this question. Perhaps it might be possible to deduce the correct rules of reasoning from the mere assumption that we have some ultimate aim. But I cannot see how this could be done. If we had, for example, no other aim then the pleasure of the momnet, we should fall back
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into the same absence of any logic that the fallacious argument would lead to. We should have no ideal of reasoning, and consequently no norm. It seems to me that the logician ought to recognize what our ultimate aim is. It would seem to be the business of the moralist to find this out; and that the logician has to accept the the teaching of ethics in this regard. But the moralist, as far as I can make it out, merely tells us that we have a piwer of self control, that no narrow or selfish aim can ever prove satisfactory, that the only satisfactory aim is the broadest, highest, and must gene
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ral possible aim; and for any more definite information, as I concieve the matter, he has to refer us to the esthetician who business it is to say what it the state of things which is most admirable in itself regardless og any ulterior reason. So, then, we appeal to the esthete to tell us what it is that is admirable without any reason for being admirable beyound its inherent character. Why, that, he replies is the beautiful. Yes, we urge, such us the name that you give to it but what is it? What is thia character? If he replies that it consists in a certain quality of feeling, a certain
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bliss, I for one decline altogether to accept the answer as sufficient. I should say to him, My dear Sir, if you can prove to me that this quality of feeling that you speak of does as a fact, attch to what you call the beautiful, or that which would be admirable without any reason for being so, I am willing enough to believe you; but I cannot without strenuous proof admit that any particular quality of feeling is admirable without a reason. For it is too revolting to be believed unless one is forced to believe it. A fundamental question like this, however practical the issues of it may be, differs entirely from any ordinary practical question, in that whatever is accepted