Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/440

424 pass a day now without noting some striking instance of natural selection, but if Darwin had not lived, where would one's eyes be now? What distinguishes the real perception from the individual freak, is that other people may be brought to perceive it, too. They may need preliminary training, they may need fine natural parts to begin with, but if those who are fitly endowed and prepared can be made to see it too, then the perception is real. If but one or two hold out, they are simply eccentric. So in morals. One time differs from another because it has had contact with moral geniuses that have taught it to perceive what, but for them, it would have stayed blind to. It is not just, therefore, to set up the taste of the individual as the test of morality or anything else; taken alone, his taste is a test of nothing; it becomes a test of something only in unison with the taste of the great majority of his fellows.

I must not be understood to attribute this argument to specific writers. When one argues on paper, one seldom does it so badly. But we are dealing now with the things that one believes, not with what one prepares for print and publishes. I am quite ready to admit that outside of the philosopher's closet the only qualities that really exist, moral or otherwise, are those which the majority has permitted to do so. The real world is a world of convention; majority vote is the sole creative force in nature. But its power stops at the study door. Conventions fall away from the philosopher when he seats himself among his books; it is his business to see things as in themselves they really are, not as every one agrees they are. You may not come to him and say that everybody says the rose is red, except Jones, and that therefore the rose is red and Jones is something unmentionable. He will turn upon you with the chill of logic in his voice and demand: You say the rose is red; Jones says it is green. What reason is there to prefer Jones's eye to yours, or yours to his? His standard of color is his eye; your standard is your eye; the rose is both red and green,—red according to your standard, green according to Jones's. There is no contradiction in the rose's being in that