Owing to the great unclearness as to the nature of evidence, almost universal, it becomes conceivable why, as often happens, we meet with the expression “more or less self-evident.” Even Descartes and Pascal use such expressions, although it is clearly quite unsuitable. Whatever is self-evident is certain, and certainty in the real sense knows no distinctions of degree. Even quite recently we find the opinion expressed in the _Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie_ (and the writer is manifestly quite serious), that there exist _self-evident suppositions_ which, in spite of their self-evidence, may quite well be false. It is unnecessary to add that I hold this to be opposed to reason. I may here, however, express regret that lectures delivered by me at a time when I still regarded degrees of conviction as intensities of judgment, seem to have given an occasion for such confusions. [28] (_p. 19_). Cf. Hume’s Essay, already cited: _An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals._ Other philosophers, who have placed the foundation of ethics in the feelings, as e.g. Beneke and Uberweg (who follows him) have seen further than Hume here. (Cf. the presentation of Beneke’s ethics in his _Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie_, iii.) Herbart comes still nearer to the truth when he speaks of self-evident judgments of taste (these, however, are really not judgments at all, but feelings, and as such are not self-evident, but can only be said to have something analogous to self-evident judgments) and when he further opposes to the merely pleasurable the beautiful, ascribing to the latter as distinct from the former, universal validity and undeniable worth. Unfortunately, there is always something false mixed up with his view, and Herbart loses at once and for ever the right path, so that his ethics in its course diverges much further from the truth than the doctrine of Hume.