In the choice between alternatives there are three ways in which judgment may be exercised. The first mode, if it can be called judgment at all, is to accept the decision of chance—to cast lots, or merely to drift into a decision. An opposite to this is purely rational choice. But rational choice, if strictly interpreted as a logical process, involves great complications. If a man would choose according to the methods of strict reason, he must, first of all, purge himself of all passion, for passion and reason are antagonistic. Next, he must examine himself as to the possibility of latent prejudice; and as prejudice may be unconsciously inherited, he must include in the sphere of his examination ancestral and national bias. Then, he must accumulate all the evidence that can possibly bear upon the question in hand, and foresee every eventuality that can result from either alternative. When he has all the materials of choice before him, he must proceed to balance them against one another, seeing first that the mental faculties employed in the process have been equally developed by training. All such preliminary conditions having been satisfied, he may venture to enquire on which side the balance dips, maintaining his suspense so long as the dip is undecided. And when a man has done all this he has attained only that degree of approach to strictly rational choice which his imperfect nature admits. Such pure reason has no place in real life: judgment in practical affairs is something between chance and this strict reason; it attempts to use the machinery of rational choice, but only so far as practical considerations proper to the matter in hand allow. This medium choice is what I am here calling Judgment by Appearances, for it is clear that the antithesis between appearance and reality will obtain so long as the materials of choice are scientifically incomplete; the term will apply with more and more appropriateness as the divergence from perfect conditions of choice is greater.
This idealised: a maximum in the issue.
Judgment by Appearances so defined is the only method of judgment proper to practical life, and accordingly an exalted exhibition of it must furnish a keen dramatic interest. How is such a process to be glorified? Clearly Judgment by Appearances will reach the ideal stage when there is the maximum of importance in the issue to be decided and the minimum of evidence by which to decide it. These two conditions are satisfied in the Caskets Story. In questions touching the individual life, that of marriage has this unique importance, that it is bound up with wide consequences which extend beyond the individual himself to his posterity. With the suitors of Portia the question is of marriage with the woman who is presented as supreme of her age in beauty, in wealth and in character; ii. i. 40, &c.moreover, the other alternative is a vow of perpetual celibacy. So the question at issue in the Caskets Story concerns the most important act of life in the most important form in which it can be imagined to present itself. and a minimum in the evidence.When we turn to the evidence on which this question is to be decided we find that of rational evidence there is absolutely none. The choice is to be made between three caskets distinguished by their metals and by the accompanying inscriptions:
ii. vii. 5-9.
Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.
Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.
Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.
However individual fancies may incline, it is manifestly impossible to set up any train of reasoning which should discover a ground of preference amongst the three. And it is worth noting, as an example of Shakespeare's nicety in detail, that the successful chooser reads in the scroll which announces his victory,
iii. ii. 132.
You that choose not by the view,