Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/230

Rh in so far as they serve to give truth or validity to a certain group of assertions about each one of them.

I next turn to another region of examples. I have already more than once referred to the sort of Being that, in many minds, attaches to the moral law. What kind of Reality then, in the universe, has justice, or charity, or in general the good? Here indeed we are once more upon ground that the Platonic dialogues have rendered very familiar, — a ground too that the controversies of later forms of Realism and Idealism have caused to appear, to many minds, too much trampled over to be any longer fruitful. I venture only at the moment to insist that in this case familiarity has simply not meant clearness, and that it is far easier to talk of certain questions as hopelessly antiquated, than to give them any precise answer.

Of course it is possible to undertake to regard the moral law, or such objects as justice, in the same light in which we have just been viewing the facts that result from social law and from convention. Every student of Ethics knows, however, the arguments in favor of giving the ethical truths a more permanent type of validity than we assign to prices and to social conventions. In any case, however, the mention of this familiar Platonic group of instances carries us at once over to a form of reality whose formally eternal validity is, to the once awakened metaphysical sense, something both marvellous and unquestionable.