My subject, as you know, is Ethics and I will adopt the explanation of
that term which Professor Moore has given in his book Principia Ethica.
He says: "Ethics is the general enquiry into what is good." Now I am
going to use the term Ethics in a slightly wider sense, in a sense in
fact which includes what I believe to be the most essential part of
what is generally called Aesthetics.

And to make you see as clearly as possible what I take to be the
subject matter of Ethics I will put before you a number of more or less
synonymous expressions each of which could be substituted for the above
definition, and by enumerating them I want to produce the same sort of
effect which Galton produced when he took a number of photos of
different faces on the same photographic plate in order to get the
picture of the typical features they all had in common. And as by
showing to you such a collective photo I could make you see what is the
typical--say--Chinese face; so if you look through the row of synonyms
which I will put before you, you will, I hope, be able to see the
characteristic features they all have in common and these are the
characteristic features of Ethics.

Now instead of saying "Ethics is the enquiry into what is good" I
could have said Ethics is the enquiry into what is valuable, or, into
what is really important, or I could have said Ethics is the enquiry
into the meaning of life, or into what makes life worth living, or into
the right way of living. I believe if you look at all these phrases
you will get a rough idea as to what it is that Ethics is concerned
with.

Now the first thing that strikes one about all these expressions is
that each of them is actually used in two very different senses. I
will call them the trivial or relative sense on the one hand and the
ethical or absolute sense on the other. If for instance I say that
this is a good chair this means that the chair serves a certain
predetermined purpose and the word good here has only meaning so far as
this purpose has been previously fixed upon. In fact the word good in
the relative sense simply means coming up to a certain predetermined
standard. Thus when we say that this man is a good pianist we mean
that he can play pieces of a certain degree of difficulty with a
certain degree of dexterity. And similarly if I say that it is
important for me not to catch cold I mean that catching a cold produces
certain describable disturbances in my life and if I say that this is
the right road I mean that it's the right road relative to a certain
goal.

Used in this way these expressions don't present any difficult or
deep problems. But this is not how Ethics uses them. Supposing that I
could play tennis and one of you saw me playing and said "Well, you
play pretty badly" and suppose I answered "I know, I'm playing pretty
badly but I don't want to play any better," all the other man could say
would be "Ah, then that's all right." But suppose I had told one of
you a preposterous lie and he came up to me and said, "You're behaving
like a beast" and then I were to say "I know I behave badly, but then I
don't want to behave any better," could he then say "Ah, then that's
all right"? Certainly not; he would say "Well, you ought to want to
behave better." Here you have an absolute judgment of value, whereas
the first instance was one of relative judgment.

The essence of this difference seems to be obviously this: Every
judgment of relative value is a mere statement of facts and can
therefore be put in such a form that it loses all the appearance of a
judgment of value: Instead of saying "This is the right way to
Granchester," I could equally well have said, "This is the right way
you have to go if you want to get to Granchester in the shortest time";
"This man is a good runner" simply means that he runs a certain number
of miles in a certain number of minutes, etc.

Now what I wish to contend is that, although all judgments of
relative value can be shown to be mere statement of facts, no statement
of fact can ever be, or imply, a judgment of absolute value.

Let me explain this: Suppose one of you were an omniscient person
and therefore knew all the movements of all the bodies in the world
dead or alive and that he also knew all the states of mind of all human
beings that ever lived, and suppose this man wrote all he knew in a big
book, then this book would contain the whole description of the world;
and what I want to say is, that this book would contain nothing that we
would call an ethical judgment or anything that would logically imply
such a judgment. It would of course contain all relative judgments of
value and all true scientific propositions and in fact all true
propositions that can be made. But all the facts described would, as
it were, stand on the same level and in the same way all propositions
stand on the same level. There are no propositions which, in any
absolute sense, are sublime, important, or trivial.

Now perhaps some of you will agree to that and be reminded of
Hamlet's words: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it
so." But this again could lead to a misunderstanding. What Hamlet
says seems to imply that good and bad, though not qualities of the
world outside us, are attributes to our states of mind. But what I
mean is that a state of mind, so far as we mean by that a fact which we
can describe, is in no ethical sense good or bad. If for instance in
our world-book we read the description of a murder with all its details
physical and psychological, the mere description of these facts will
contain nothing which we could call an ethical proposition. The murder
will be on exactly the same level as any other event, for instance the
falling of a stone. Certainly the reading of description might cause
us pain or rage or any other emotion, or we might read about the pain
or rage caused by this murder in other people when they have heard of
it, but there will simply be facts, facts, and facts but no Ethics.

And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics really would
have to be if there were such a science, this result seems to me quite
obvious. It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever think or
say should be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book, the
subject matter of which could be intrinsically sublime and above all
other subject matters. I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor,
that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on
Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books
in the world. Our words used as we use them in science, are vessels
capable only of containing and conveying meaning and sense, natural
meaning and sense. Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our
words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full
of water and if I were to pour out a gallon over it . . . .

I said that so far as facts and propositions are concerned there is
only relative value and relative good, right, etc. And let me, before
I go on, illustrate this by a rather obvious example. The right road
is the road which leads to an arbitrarily predetermined end and it is
quite clear to us all that there is no sense in talking about the right
road apart from such a predetermined goal. Now let us see what we
could possibly mean by the expression, 'the absolutely right road.' I
think it would be the road which everybody on seeing it would, with
logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going. And
similarly the absolute good, if it is a describable state of affairs,
would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and
inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not
bringing about. And I want to say that such a state of affairs is a
chimera. No state of affairs has, in itself, what I would like to call
the coercive power of an absolute judge.

Then what have all of us who, like myself, are still tempted to use
such expressions as 'absolute good,' 'absolute value,' etc., what have
we in mind and what do we try to express? Now whenever I try to make
this clear to myself it is natural that I should recall cases in which
I would certainly use these expressions and I am then in the situation
in which you would be if, for instance, I were to give you a lecture on
the psychology of pleasure. What you would do then would be to try and
recall some typical situation in which you always felt pleasure. For,
bearing this situation in mind, all I should say to you would become
concrete and, as it were, controllable. One man would perhaps choose
as stock example the sensation when taking a walk on a fine summer's
day. Now in this situation I am, if I want to fix my mind on what I
mean by absolute or ethical value.

And there, in my case. it always happens that the idea of one
particular experience presents itself to me which therefore is, in a
sense, my experience par excellence and this is the reason why, in
talking to you now, I will use this experience as my first and foremost
example. (As I have said before, this is an entirely personal matter
and others would find other examples more striking.) I will describe
this experience in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or
similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our
investigation.

I believe the best way of describing it is to say that when I have
it I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then inclined to
use such phrases as 'how extraordinary that anything should exist' or
'how extraordinary that the world should exist.'

I will mention another experience straight away which I also know
and which others of you might be acquainted with: it is, what one might
call, the experience of feeling absolutely safe. I mean the state of
mind in which one is inclined to say 'I am safe, nothing can injure me
whatever happens.'

Now let me consider these experiences, for, I believe, they exhibit
the very characteristics we try to get clear about. And there the
first thing I have to say is, that the verbal expression which we give
to these experiences is nonsense!

If I say 'I wonder at the existence of the world' I am misusing
language. Let me explain this: It has a perfectly good and clear sense
to say that I wonder at something being the case, we all understand
what it means to say that I wonder at the size of a dog which is bigger
than any one I have ever seen before or at any thing which, in the
common sense of the word, is extraordinary. In every such case I
wonder at something being the case which I could conceive not to be the
case. I wonder at the size of this dog because I could conceive of a
dog of another, namely the ordinary size, at which I should not wonder.
To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I
can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the
existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for
a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the
meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of
the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.

I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If
for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I
could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's
clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being
whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering
at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then
it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

Now the same applies to the other experience which I have
mentioned, the experience of absolute safety. We all know what it
means in ordinary life to be safe. I am safe in my room, when I cannot
be run over by an omnibus. I am safe if I have had whooping cough and
cannot therefore get it again. To be safe essentially means that it is
physically impossible that certain things should happen to me and
therefore it is nonsense to say that I am safe whatever happens. Again
this is a misuse of the word 'safe' as the other example was of a
misuse of the word 'existence' or 'wondering.'

Now I want to impress on you that a certain characteristic misuse
of our language runs through all ethical and religious expressions.
All these expressions seem, prima facie, to be just similes. Thus it
seems that when we are using the word right in an ethical sense,
although, what we mean, is not right in its trivial sense, it's
something similar, and when we say 'This is a good fellow,' although
the word good here doesn't mean what it means in the sentence 'This is
a good football player' there seems to be some similarity. And when we
say 'This man's life was valuable' we don't mean it in the same sense
in which we would speak of some valuable jewelry but there seems to be
some sort of analogy.

Now all religious terms seem in this sense to be used as similes or
allegorically. For when we speak of God and that he sees everything
and when we kneel and pray to him all our terms and actions seem to be
parts of a great and elaborate allegory which represents him as a human
being of great power whose grace we try to win, etc., etc.

But this allegory also describes the experience which I have just
referred to. For the first of them is, I believe, exactly what people
were referring to when they said that God had created the world; and
the experience of absolute safety has been described by saying that we
feel safe in the hands of God. A third experience of the same kind is
that of feeling guilty and again this was described by the phrase that
God disapproves of our conduct.

Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be
using similes. But a simile must be the simile for something. And if
I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop
the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as
soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts which
stand behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at
first appeared to be simile now seems to be mere nonsense.

Now the three experiences which I have mentioned to you (and I
could have added others) seem to those who have experienced them, for
instance to me, to have in some sense an intrinsic, absolute value.
But when I say they are experiences, surely, they are facts; they have
taken place then and there, lasted a certain definite time and
consequently are describable. And so from what I have said some
minutes ago I must admit it is nonsense to say that they have absolute
value. And I will make my point still more acute by saying 'It is the
paradox that an experience, a fact, should seem to have supernatural
value.'

Now there is a way in which I would be tempted to meet this
paradox. Let me first consider, again, our first experience of
wondering at the existence of the world and let me describe it in a
slightly different way; we all know what in ordinary life would be
called a miracle. It obviously is simply an event the like of which we
have never yet seen. Now suppose such an event happened. Take the
case that one of you suddenly grew a lion's head and began to roar.
Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. Now
whenever we should have recovered from our surprise, what I would
suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically
investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him
vivisected. And where would the miracle have got to? For it is clear
that when we look at it in this way everything miraculous has
disappeared; unless what we mean by this term is merely that a fact has
not yet been explained by science which again means that we have
hitherto failed to group this fact with others in a scientific system.
This shows that it is absurd to say 'Science has proved that there are
no miracles.' The truth is that the scientific way of looking at a
fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle. For imagine whatever
fact you may, it is not in itself miraculous in the absolute sense of
that term. For we see now that we have been using the word 'miracle'
in a relative and an absolute sense. And I will now describe the
experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is
the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.

Now I am tempted to say that the right expression in language for
the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any
proposition in language, is the existence of language itself. But what
then does it mean to be aware of this miracle at some times and not at
other times? For all I have said by shifting the expression of the
miraculous from an expression by means of language to the expression by
the existence of language, all I have said is again that we cannot
express what we want to express and that all we can say about the
absolute miraculous remains nonsense.

Now the answer to all this will seem perfectly clear to many of
you. You will say: Well, if certain experiences constantly tempt us to
attribute a quality to them which we call absolute or ethical value and
importance, this simply shows that by these words we don't mean
nonsense, that after all what we mean by saying that an experience has
absolute value is just a fact like other facts and that all it comes to
is that we have not yet succeeded in finding the correct logical
analysis of what we mean by our ethical and religious expressions. Now
when this is urged against me I at once see clearly, as it were in a
flash of light, not only that no description that I can think of would
do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject
every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest, ab
initio, on the ground of its significance.

That is to say: I see now that these nonsensical expressions were
not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions,
but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted
to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say
beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the
tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion
was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against
the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far
as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate
meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no
science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But
it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally
cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.