[257] It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have thought of as the “radical vice of all goodness”--its tendency to forget that other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as absolute “values,” as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking of here is simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace, when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of the heavens (_impavidum ferient ruinae_) or by the idea of the Stoic sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust. [258] By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects upon our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not) of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our total general activity of all the particular happenings and incidents of our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast system of “dispositions” with which our psychophysical organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience. And in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of the adult, the coming into play of the many associations and memories that are acquired during the experiences of a single lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret to us the present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we attach to human history as distinguished from the mere course of events--the significance upon which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon the _Philosophy of History_ in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s _Kultur der Gegenwart_.