But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice;
nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say
that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat
superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy
to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse
were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat
had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by
getting to the grave first. Or he might feel that he had actually
inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by keeping him alive.
Just as a microbe might feel proud of spreading a pestilence,
so the pessimistic mouse might exult to think that he was renewing
in the cat the torture of conscious existence. It all depends
on the philosophy of the mouse. You cannot even say that there
is victory or superiority in nature unless you have some doctrine
about what things are superior. You cannot even say that the cat
scores unless there is a system of scoring. You cannot even say
that the cat gets the best of it unless there is some best to
be got.

We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature,
and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will
leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God.
We must have our own vision. But the attempts of most moderns
to express it are highly vague.

Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere
passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man
of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human
morality is never up to date. How can anything be up to date?--
a date has no character. How can one say that Christmas