Page:Principia Ethica 1922.djvu/79

Rh and of this fact, practical Ethics, as we shall see later, must certainly take account: but when she is supposed to have a preference for what is necessary, what is necessary means only what is necessary to obtain a certain end, presupposed as the highest good; and what the highest good is Nature cannot determine. Why should we suppose that what is merely necessary to life is ipso facto better than what is necessary to the study of metaphysics, useless as that study may appear? It may be that life is only worth living, because it enables us to study metaphysics—is a necessary means thereto. The fallacy of this argument from nature has been discovered as long ago as Lucian. ‘I was almost inclined to laugh,’ says Callicratidas, in one of the dialogues imputed to him, ‘just now, when Charicles was praising irrational brutes and the savagery of the Scythians: in the heat of his argument he was almost repenting that he was born a Greek. What wonder if lions and bears and pigs do not act as I was proposing? That which reasoning would fairly lead a man to choose, cannot be had by creatures that do not reason, simply because they are so stupid. If Prometheus or some other god had given each of them the intelligence of a man, then they would not have lived in deserts and mountains nor fed on one another. They would have built temples just as we do, each would have lived in the centre of his family, and they would have formed a nation bound by mutual laws. Is it anything surprising that brutes, who have had the misfortune to be unable to obtain by forethought any of the goods with which reasoning provides us, should have missed love too? Lions do not love; but neither do they philosophise; bears do not love, but the reason is they do not know the sweets of friendship. It is only men, who, by their wisdom and knowledge, after many trials, have chosen what is best.’ 29. To argue that a thing is good because it is ‘natural,’ or bad because it is ‘unnatural,’ in these common senses of the term, is therefore certainly fallacious; and yet such arguments are very frequently used. But they do not commonly pretend to give a systematic theory of Ethics. Among attempts to