I once heard of a meritorious lady who was extremely conventional; on the slender grounds of carefully acquired habits of preferring the word "woman" to the word "lady" and of going to the post-office without a hat, imagined that she was unconventional and altogether a remarkable person; and who once remarked with great satisfaction that she was a "very queer person," and that nothing shocked her "except, of course, bad form." Thus, she asserted that all the things which shocked her were actions in bad form; and she would undoubtedly agree, though she did not actually state it, that all the things which were done in bad form would shock her. Consequently she asserted that the class of things which shocked her was the class of actions in bad form. Consequently the statement of this lady that some or all of the actions done in bad form shocked her is an identical proposition of the form "nothing shocks me, except, of course, the things which do, in fact, shock me"; and this statement the lady certainly did not intend to make. This excellent lady, had she but known it, was logically justified in making any statement whatever about her unconventionality. For the class of her unconventional actions was the null class. Thus she might logically have made inconsistent statements about this class of actions. As a matter of fact she did make inconsistent statements, but unfortunately she justified them by stating that, "It is the privilege of woman to be inconsistent." She was one of those persons who say things like that. CHAPTER V ETHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE LAW OF IDENTITY It may be remembered that Mr. Podsnap remarked, with sadness tempered by satisfaction, that he regretted to say that "Foreign nations do as they do do." Besides aiding the comforting expression of moral disapproval, the law of identity has yet another useful purpose in practical ethics: It serves the welcome purpose of providing an excuse for infractions of the moral law. There was once a man who treated his wife badly, was unfaithful to her, was dishonest in business, and was not particular in his use of language; and yet his life on earth was described in the lines: This man maintained a wife's a wife, Men are as they are made, Business is business, life is life; And called a spade a spade. One of the objects of Dr. G. E. Moore's _Principia Ethica_[22] was to argue that the word "good" means simply good, and not pleasant or anything else. Appropriately enough, this book bore on its title-page the quotation from the preface to the _Sermons_, published in 1726, of Bishop Joseph Butler, the author of the _Analogy_: "Everything is what it is and not another thing." But another famous Butler--Samuel Butler, the author of _Hudibras_--went farther than this, and maintained that identities were the highest attainment of metaphysics itself. At the beginning of the first Canto of _Hudibras_, in the description of Hudibras himself, Butler wrote: