[7] Doubtless under such circumstances ideal virtue might also have survival value in the biological sense. [8] Indirectly, no doubt, sanctions may perform a most important educational work in stimulating and guiding the higher loyalties. The approval or disapproval of our fellows, the “terrors of the law,” the belief in future rewards and punishments, though their immediate appeal is only to self-interest, may powerfully aid in the creation of moral judgments sufficiently free from any “empirical elements of desire” to have satisfied Kant himself. PART III _INTELLECTUAL VALUES_ LECTURE V INTRODUCTION TO PART III I In the preceding lectures I have given reasons for thinking that in two great departments of human interest—Æsthetics and Ethics—the highest beliefs and emotions cannot claim to have any survival value. They must be treated as by-products of the evolutionary process; and are, therefore, on the naturalistic hypothesis, doubly accidental. They are accidental in the larger sense of being the product of the undesigned collocation and interplay of material entities—molecular atoms, sub-atoms, and ether—which preceded, and will presumably outlast, that fraction of time during which organic life will have appeared, developed, and perished. They are also accidental in the narrower sense of being only accidentally associated with that process of selective elimination, which, if Darwinism be true, has so happily imitated contrivance in the adaptation of organisms to their environment. They are the accidents of an accident. I disagreed with this conclusion, but I did not attempt to refute it. I contented myself with pointing out that it was destructive of values; and that, the greater the values, the more destructive it became. The difficulty, indeed, on which I have so far insisted is not a logical one. We have not been concerned with premises and conclusions. Neither our æsthetic emotions nor our moral sentiments are the product of ratiocination; nor is it by ratiocination that they are likely to suffer essential wrong. If you would damage them beyond repair, yoke them to a theory of the universe which robs them of all general significance. Then, at the very moment when they aspire to transcendent authority, their own history will rise up in judgment against them, impugning their pretensions, and testifying to their imposture. II The inquiry on which I now propose to enter will follow a more or less parallel course, and will reach a more or less similar conclusion. Yet some characteristic differences it must necessarily exhibit. In the higher regions of æsthetics and ethics, emotions and beliefs are inextricably intertwined. They are what naturalists describe as “symbiotic.” Though essentially different, they are mutually dependent. If one be destroyed, the other withers away.