be', and, at first sight at any rate, the two seem very different. Much
that is--ignorance, sin, misery, ugliness--ought not to be, and much
that ought to be is very far from being fact. We are accustomed to
regard this as a matter of course, but, closely considered, it is
perhaps the supreme wonder of all the wonders. We creatures of
circumstance, as we call ourselves, can take stock of the sum of things
to which we belong, and judge it. It is not simply that we can, and
often do, _wish_ that it were different in various ways; we can judge
that it _ought_ to be different, and you may find a man of science like
Huxley, after a life spent in trying to understand the laws which
prevail in the world, deliberately making it his last word to his
fellows that their duty is to set themselves to reverse the 'cosmic
process', to select for preservation just the human types which, if the
much-abused metaphor may be tolerated, Nature, left to herself, selects
for destruction.

We might, of course, regard this apparently unreconcilable conflict
between the arrangements which do prevail; as is commonly supposed, in
the world, and those which ought to prevail, as a mystery which we must
despair of ever understanding. But, to say the least of it, it is hardly
consistent with the philosophic temper to treat any question as an
insoluble riddle until one has tried all ways of solution and found them
_culs-de-sac_. If we are to be thoroughly loyal to the spirit which
prompts all intelligent inquiry, we are bound at least to ask whether
it is, after all, beyond the power of human intelligence to think of the
world as a system in which somehow, in the end, what ought to be
prescribes what is. It is true that, for reasons already mentioned, we
cannot, like Spinoza or the Sufis, reconcile facts and values by the
simple assumption that what is is shown, by the fact that it is, to be
what ought to be, and that our common conviction that sin and ugliness