Every summer, for several years past, it has been my custom to arrange in some pleasant place, either in England or on the continent, a gathering of old college friends. In this way I have been enabled not only to maintain some happy intimacies, but (what to a man of my occupation is not unimportant) to refresh and extend, by an interchange of ideas with men of various callings, an experience of life which might be otherwise unduly monotonous and confined. Last year, in particular, our meeting was rendered to me especially agreeable by the presence of a very dear friend, Philip Audubon, whom, since his business lay in the East, I had not had an opportunity of seeing for many years. I mention him particularly, because, although, as will be seen, he did not take much part in the discussion I am about to describe, he was, in a sense, the originator of it. For, in the first place, it was he who had invited us to the place in which we were staying, an upland valley in Switzerland, where he had taken a house; and, further, it was through my renewed intercourse with him that I was led into the train of thought which issued in the following conversation. His life in the East, a life laborious and monotonous in the extreme, had confirmed in him a melancholy to which he was constitutionally inclined, and which appeared to be rather heightened than diminished by exceptional success in a difficult career. I hesitate to describe his attitude as pessimistic, for the word has associations with the schools from which he was singularly free. His melancholy was not the artificial product of a philosophic system; it was temperamental rather than intellectual, and might be described, perhaps, as an intuition rather than a judgment of the worthlessness and irrationality of the world. Such a position is not readily shaken by argument, nor did I make any direct attempt to assail it; but it could not fail to impress itself strongly upon my mind, and to keep my thoughts constantly employed upon that old problem of the worth of things, in which, indeed, for other reasons, I was already sufficiently interested.

A further impulse in the same direction was given by the arrival of another old friend, Arthur Ellis. He and I had been drawn together at college by a common interest in philosophy; but in later years our paths had diverged widely. Fortune and inclination had led him into an active career, and for some years he had been travelling abroad as correspondent to one of the daily papers. I felt, therefore, some curiosity to renew my acquaintance with him, and to ascertain how far his views had been modified by his experience of the world.

The morning after his arrival he joined Audubon and myself in a kind of loggia at the back of the house, which was our common place of rendezvous. We exchanged the usual greetings, and for some minutes nothing more was said, so pleasant was it to sit silent in the shade listening to the swish of scythes (they were cutting the grass in the meadow opposite) and to the bubbling of a little fountain in the garden on our right, while the sun grew hotter every minute on the fir-covered slopes beyond. I wanted to talk, and yet I was unwilling to begin; but presently Ellis turned to me and said: “Well, my dear philosopher, and how goes the world with you? What have you been doing in all these years since we met?”

“Oh,” I replied, “nothing worth talking about.”

“What have you been thinking then?”

“Just now I have been thinking how well you look. Knocking about the world seems to suit you.”

“I think it does. And yet at this moment, whether it be the quiet of the place, or whether it be the sight of your philosophic countenance, I feel a kind of yearning for the contemplative life. I believe if I stayed here long you would lure me back to philosophy; and yet I thought I had finally escaped when I broke away from you before.”

“It is not so easy,” I said, “to escape from that net, once one is caught. But it was not I who spread the snare; I was only trying to help you out, or, at least, to get out myself.”

“And have you found a way?”

“No, I cannot say that I have. That’s why I want to talk to you and hear how you have fared.”

“I? Oh, I have given the whole subject up.”

“You can hardly give up the subject till you give up life. You may have given up reading books about it; and, for that matter, so have I. But that is only because I want to grapple with it more closely.”

“What do you do, then, if you do not read books?”

“I talk to as many people as I can, and especially to those who have had no special education in philosophy; and try to find out to what conclusions they have been led by their own direct experience.”

“Conclusions about what?”

“About many things. But in particular about the point we used to be fondest of discussing in the days before you had, as you say, given up the subject I mean the whole question of the values we attach, or ought to attach, to things.”

“Oh!” he said, “well, as to all that, my opinion is the same as of old. ‘There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ So I used to say at college and so I say now.”

“I remember,” I replied, “that that is what you always used to say; but I thought I had refuted you over and over again.”

“So you may have done, as far as logic can refute; but every bit of experience which I have had since last we met has confirmed me in my original view.”

“That,” I said, “is very interesting, and is just what I want to hear about. What is it that experience has done for you? For, as you know, I have so little of my own, I try to get all I can out of other people’s.”

“Well,” he said, “the effect of mine has been to bring home to me, in a way I could never realize before, the extraordinary diversity of men’s ideals.”

“That, you find, is the effect of travel?”

“I think so. Travelling really does open the eyes. For instance, until I went to the East I never really felt the antagonism between the Oriental view of life and our own. Now, it seems to me clear that either they are mad or we are; and upon my word, I don’t know which. Of course, when one is here, one supposes it is they. But when one gets among them and really talks to them, when one realizes how profound and intelligent is their contempt for our civilization, how worthless they hold our aims and activities, how illusory our progress, how futile our intelligence, one begins to wonder whether, after all, it is not merely by an effect of habit that one judges them to be wrong and ourselves right, and whether there is anything at all except blind prejudice in any opinions and ideas about Right and Wrong.”

“In fact,” interposed Audubon, “you agree, like me, with Sir Richard Burton:

“’There is no good, there is no bad, these be the whims of mortal will;
What works me weal that call I good, what harms and hurts I hold as ill.
They change with space, they shift with race, and in the veriest span of
time,
Each vice has worn a virtue’s crown, all good been banned as sin or
crime.’”

“Yes,” he assented, “and that is what is brought home to one by travel. Though really, if one had penetration enough, it would not be necessary to travel to make the discovery. A single country, a single city, almost a single village, would illustrate, to one who can look below the surface, the same truth. Under the professed uniformity of beliefs, even here in England, what discrepancies and incongruities are concealed! Every type, every individual almost, is distinguished from every other in precisely this point of the judgments he makes about Good. What does the soldier and adventurer think of the life of a studious recluse? or the city man of that of the artist? and vice versa? Behind the mask of good manners we all of us go about judging and condemning one another root and branch. We are in no real agreement as to the worth either of men or things. It is an illusion of the ‘canting moralist’ (to use Stevenson’s phrase) that there is any fixed and final standard of Good. Good is just what any one thinks it to be; and one man has as much right to his opinion as another.”

“But,” I objected, “it surely does not follow that because there are different opinions about Good, they are all equally valuable.”

“No. I should infer rather that they are all equally worthless.”

“That does not seem to me legitimate either; and I venture to doubt whether you really believe it yourself.”

“Well, at any rate I am inclined to think I do.”

“In a sense perhaps you do; but not in the sense which seems to me most important. I mean that when it comes to the point, you act, and are practically bound to act, upon your opinion about what is good, as though you did believe it to be true.”

“How do you mean ‘practically bound?’”

“I mean that it is only by so acting that you are able to introduce any order or system into your life, or in fact to give it to yourself any meaning at all. Without the belief that what you hold to be good really somehow is so, your life, I think, would resolve itself into mere chaos.”

“I don’t see that”

“Well, I may be wrong, but my notion is that what systematizes a life is choice; and choice, I believe, means choice of what we hold to be good.”

“Surely not! Surely we may choose what we hold to be bad.”

“I doubt it”

“But how then do you account for what you call bad men?”

“I should say they are men who choose what I think bad but they think good.”

“But are there not men who deliberately choose what they think bad, like Milton’s Satan ’Evil be thou my Good’?”

“Yes, but by the very terms of the expression he was choosing what he thought good; only he thought that evil was good.”

“But that is a contradiction.”

“Yes, it is the contradiction in which he was involved, and in which I believe everyone is involved who chooses, as you say, the Bad. To them it is not only bad, it is somehow also good.”

“Does that apply to Nero, for example?”

“Yes, I think it very well might; the things which he chose, power and wealth and the pleasures of the senses, he chose because he thought them good; if his choice also involved what he thought bad, such as murder and rapine and the like (if he did think these bad, which I doubt), then there was a contradiction not so much in his choice as in its consequences. But even if I were to admit that he and others have chosen and do choose what they believe to be bad, it would not affect the point I want to make. For to choose Bad must be, in your view, as absurd as to choose Good; since, I suppose, you do not believe, that our opinions about the one have any more validity than our opinions about the other. So that if we are to abandon Good as a principle of choice, it is idle to say we may fall back upon Bad.”

“No, I don’t say that we may; nor do I see that we must We do not need either the one or the other. You must have noticed I am sure I have that men do not in practice choose with any direct reference to Good or Bad; they choose what they think will bring them pleasure, or fame, or power, or, it may be, barely a livelihood.”

“But believing, surely, that these things are good?”

“Not necessarily; not thinking at all about it, perhaps.”

“Perhaps not thinking about it as we are now; but still, so far believing that what they have chosen Is good, that if you were to go to them and suggest that, after all, it is bad they would be seriously angry and distressed.”

“But, probably,” interposed Audubon, “like me, they could not help themselves. We are none of us free, in the way you seem to imagine. We have to choose the best we can, and often it is bad enough.”

“No doubt,” I replied, “but still, as you say yourself, what we choose is the best we can, that is, the most good we can. The criterion is Good, only it is very little of it that we are able to realize.”

“No,” objected Ellis, “I am not prepared to admit that the criterion is Good. You will find that men will frankly confess that other pursuits or occupations are, in their opinion, better than those they have chosen, and that these better things were and are open to themselves, and yet they continue to devote themselves to the worse, knowing it all the time to be the worse.”

“But in most cases,” I replied, “these better things, surely, are not really ‘open’ to them, except so far as external circumstances are concerned. They are hampered in their choice by passions and desires, by that part of them which does not choose, but is passively carried away by alien attractions; and the course they actually adopt is the best they can choose, though they see a better which they would choose if they could. The choice is always of Good, but it may be diverted by passion to less Good.”

“I don’t know,” he said, “that that is a fair account of the matter.”

“Nor do I. It is so hard to analyse what goes on in one’s own consciousness, much more what goes on in other people’s. Still, that is the kind of way I should describe my own experience, and I should expect that most people who reflect would agree with me. They would say, I think, that they always choose the best they can, though regretting that they cannot choose better than they do; and it would seem to them, I think, absurd to suggest that they choose Bad, or choose without any reference either to Good or Bad.”

“Well,” he said, “granting, for the moment, that you are right what follows?”

“Why, then,” I said, “it follows that we are, as I said, ’practically bound’ to accept as valid, for the moment at least, our opinions about what is good; for otherwise we should have no principle to choose by, if it be true that the principle of choice is Good.”

“Very well,” he said, “then we should have to do without choosing!”

“But could we?”

“I don’t see why not; many people do.”

“But what sort of people? I mean what sort of life would it be?”

Ellis was preparing to answer when we were interrupted by a voice from behind. The place in which we were sitting opened at the back into one of those large lofty barns which commonly form part of a Swiss house; and as the floor of this room was covered with straw, it was possible to approach that way without making much noise. For this reason, two others of our party had been able to join us without our observing it. Their names were Parry and Leslie; the former a man of thirty, just getting into practice at the Bar, the latter still almost a boy in years, though a very precocious one, whom I had brought with me, ostensibly as a pupil, but really as a companion. He was an eager student of philosophy, and had something of that contempt of youth for any one older than twenty-five, which I can never find it in my heart to resent, though have long passed the age which qualifies me to become the object of it. He it was who was speaking, in a passionate way he had, when anything like a philosophic discussion was proceeding.

“Why,” he was saying, in answer to my last remark, “without choice one would be a mere slave of passion, a creature of every random mood and impulse, a beast, a thing, not a man at all!”

Ellis looked round rather amused.

“Well,” he said, “you fire-eater, and why not? I don’t know that impulse is such a bad thing. A good impulse is better than a bad calculation any day!”

“Yes, but you deny the validity of the distinction between Good and Bad, so it’s absurd for you to talk about a good impulse.”

“What is your position, Ellis?” asked Parry. “I’ve been trying in vain to make head or tail of it”

“Why should I take a position at all?” rejoined Ellis “I protest against this bullying.”

“But you must take a position,” cried Leslie, “if we are to discuss.”

“I don’t see why; you might take one instead.”

“Yes, but you began.”

“Well,” he conceded, “anything to oblige you. My position, then, to go back again to the beginning, is this. Seeing that there are so many different opinions about what things are good, and that no criterion has been discovered for testing these opinions

“My dear Ellis,” interrupted Parry, “I protest against all that from the very beginning. For all practical purposes there is a substantial agreement about what is good.”

“My dear Parry,” retorted Ellis, “if I am to state a position, let me state it without interruption. Considering, as I was saying, that there are so many different opinions about what things are good, and that no criterion has been discovered for testing them, I hold that we have no reason to attach any validity to these opinions, or to suppose that it is possible to have any true opinions on the subject at all.”

“And what do you say to that?” asked Parry, turning to me.

“I said, or rather I suggested, for the whole matter is very difficult to me, that in spite of the divergency of opinions on the point, and the difficulty of bringing them into harmony, we are nevertheless practically bound, whether we can justify it to our reason or not, to believe that our own opinions about what is good have somehow some validity.”

“But how ’practically bound’?” asked Leslie.

“Why, as I was trying to get Ellis to admit when you interrupted and your interruption really completed my argument I imagine it to be impossible for us not to make choices; and in making choices, as I think, we use our ideas about Good as a principle of choice.”

“But you must remember,” said Ellis, “that I have never admitted the truth of that last statement.”

“But,” I said, “if you do not admit it generally and generally, I confess, I do not see how it could be proved or disproved, except by an appeal to every individual’s experience do you not admit it in your own case? Do you not find that, in choosing, you follow your idea of what is good, so far as you can under the limitations of your own passions and of external circumstances?”

“Well,” he replied, “I wish to be candid, and I am ready to admit that I do.”

“And that you cannot conceive yourself as choosing otherwise? I mean that if you had to abandon as a principle of choice your opinion about Good, you would have nothing else to fall back upon?”

“No; I think in that case I should simply cease to choose.”

“And can you conceive yourself doing that? Can you conceive yourself living, as perhaps many men do, at random and haphazard, from moment to moment, following blindly any impulse that may happen to turn up, without any principle by which you might subordinate one to the other?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think I can.”

“That, then,” I said, “is what I meant, when I suggested that you, at any rate, and I, and other people like us, are practically bound to believe that our opinions about what is good have some validity, even though we cannot say what or how much.”

“You say, then, that we have to accept in practice what we deny in theory?”

“Yes, if you like. I say, at least, that the consequence of the attempt to bring our theoretical denial to bear upon our practice would be to reduce our life to a moral chaos, by denying the only principle of choice which we find ourselves actually able to accept. In your case and mine, as it seems, it is our opinion about Good that engenders order among our passions and desires; and without it we should sink back to be mere creatures of blind impulse, such as perhaps in fact, many men really are.”

“What!” cried Audubon, interrupting in a tone of half indignant protest, “do you mean to say that it is some idea about Good that brings order into a man’s life? All I can say is that, for my part, I never once think, from one year’s end to another, of anything so abstract and remote. I simply go on, day after day, plodding the appointed round, without reflexion, without reason, simply because I have to. There’s order in my life, heaven knows! but it has nothing to do with ideas about Good. And altogether,” he ejaculated, in a kind of passion, “it’s a preposterous thing to tell me that I believe in Good, merely because I lead a life like a mill-horse! That would be an admirable reason for believing in Bad but Good!”

He lapsed again into silence; and I was half unwilling to press him further, knowing that he felt our dialectics to be a kind of insult to his concrete woes. However, it seemed to be necessary for the sake of the argument to give some answer, so I began:

“But if you don’t like the life of a mill-horse, why do you lead it?”

“Why? because I have to!” he replied; “you don’t suppose I would do it if I could help it?”

“No,” I said, “but why can’t you help it?”

“Because,” he said, “I have to earn my living.”

“Then is it a good thing to earn your living?”

“No, but it’s a necessary thing.”

“Necessary, why?”

“Because one must live.”

“Then it is a good thing to live?”

“No, it’s a very bad one.”

“Why do you live, then?”

“Because I can’t help it.”

“But it is always possible to stop living.”

“No, it isn’t”

“But why not?”

“Because there are other people dependent on me, and I don’t choose to be such a mean skunk as to run away myself and leave other people here to suffer. Besides, it’s a sort of point of honour. As I’m here, I’m going to play the game. All I say is that the game is not worth the playing; and you will never persuade me into the belief that it Is.”

“But, my dear Philip,” I said, “there is no need for me to persuade you, for it is clear that you are persuaded already. You believe, as you have really admitted in principle, that it is good to live rather than to die; and to live, moreover, a monotonous, laborious life, which you say you detest Take away that belief, and your whole being is transformed. Either you change your manner of life, abandon the routine which you hate, break up the order imposed (as I said at first) by your idea about Good, and give yourself up to the chaos of chance desires; or you depart from life altogether, on the hypothesis that that is the good thing to do. But in any case the truth appears to remain that somehow or other you do believe in Good; and that it is this belief which determines the whole course of your life.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s no use arguing the point, but I am unconvinced.” And he sank back to his customary silence. I thought it useless to pursue the subject with him; but Ellis took up the argument.

“I agree with Audubon,” he said. “For even if I admitted your general contention, I should still maintain that it is not by virtue of any conscious idea of Good that we introduce order into our lives. We simply find ourselves, as a matter of fact, by nature and character, preferring one object to another, suppressing or developing this or that tendency. Our choices are not determined by our abstract notion of Good; on the contrary, our notion of Good is deduced from our choices.”

“You mean, I suppose, that we collect from our particular choices our general idea of the kind of things which we consider good. That may be. But the point I insist upon is that we do attach validity to these choices; they are, to us, our choices of our Good, those that we approve as distinguished from those that we do not. And my contention is that, in spite of all diversity of opinions as to what really are the good things to choose, we are bound to attach, each of us, some validity to our own, under penalty of reducing our life to a moral chaos.”

“But what do you mean by ’validity’?” asked Leslie. “Do you mean that we must believe that our opinions are right?”

“Yes,” I said, “or, at least, if not that they are right, that they are the rightest we can attain to for the time being, and until we see something righter. But above all, that opinions on this subject really are either right or wrong, or more right and less right; and that of this rightness or wrongness we really have some kind of perception, however difficult it may be to give an account of it, and that in accordance with such perception we may come to change our opinions or those of other people, by the methods of discussion and persuasion and the like. And all this, as I understand, is what Ellis was denying.”

“Certainly,” said Ellis, “I was; and I still do not see that you have proved it.”

“No,” I said, “I have not even tried to. I have only tried to show that in spite of your denial you really do believe it, because a belief in it is implied in all your practical activity. And that, I thought, you did admit yourself.”

“But even so,” he replied, “it remains to be considered whether my theory is not more reasonable than my practice.”

“Perhaps,” I replied; “but that, I admit, is not the question that really interests me. What I want to get at is the belief which underlies the whole life of people like ourselves, and of which, it seems, we cannot practically divest ourselves. And such a belief, I think, is this which we have been discussing as to the validity of our opinions about Good.”

“I see,” he said; “in fact you are concerning yourself not with philosophy but with psychology.”

“If you like; it matters little what you call it. Only, whatever it be, you will do me a service if for the moment you will place yourself at my standpoint, and see with me how things look from there.”

“Very well,” he said, “I have no objection, and so far, on the whole, I do agree with you; though I am bound to point out that you might easily find an opponent less complaisant. Your argument is very much one ad hominem.”

“It is,” I said, “and that, I confess, is the only kind of argument in which I much believe in these matters. I am content, for the present, if you and the others here go along with me.”

“I do,” said Parry, “but you seem to me to be only stating, in an unnecessarily elaborate way, what after all is a mere matter of common sense.”

“Perhaps it is,” I replied, “though I have always thought myself rather deficient in that kind of sense. But what does Leslie say?”

“Oh,” he said, “I can’t think how you can be content with anything so lame and impotent! Some method there must be, absolute and a priori, by which we may prove for certain that Good is, and discover, as well, what things are good.”

“Well,” I said, “if there be such a method, you, if anyone, should find it; and I wish you from my heart good luck in the quest. It is only in default of anything better that I fall back on this I dare not call it method; this appeal to opinion and belief.”

“And even so,” said Ellis, “it is little enough that you have shown, or rather, that I have chosen to admit. For even if it were granted that individuals, in order to choose, must believe in Good, it doesn’t follow that they believe in anything except each a Good for himself. So that, even on your own hypothesis, all we could say would be that there are a number of different and perhaps incompatible Goods, each good for some particular individual, but none necessarily good for all. I, at least, admit no more than that.”

“How do you mean?” I asked, “for I am getting lost again.”

“I mean,” he replied, “something that I should have thought was familiar enough. Granted that there really is a Good which each individual ought to choose, and does choose, if you like, as far as he can see it; or granted, at least, that he is bound to believe this, under penalty of reducing his life to moral chaos; still, I see no reason to suppose that the thing which one individual ought to choose is identical, or even compatible, with that which another ought to choose. There may be a whole series of distinct and mutually exclusive moral worlds. In other words, even though I may admit a Good for each, I am not prepared to admit a Good for all.”

“But then,” I objected, “each of these Goods will also be a not-Good; and that seems to be a contradiction.”

“Not at all,” he replied, “for each of them only professes to be Good for me, and that is quite compatible with being Bad for another.”

“But,” cried Leslie, trembling with excitement, “your whole conception is absurd. Good is simply Good; it is not Good for anybody or anything; it is Good in its own nature, one, simple, immutable eternal.”

“It may be,” replied Ellis, “but I hope you will not actually tear me to pieces if I humbly confess that I cannot see it. I see no reason to admit any such Good; it even has no meaning to me.”

“Well, anyhow, nothing else can have any meaning!”

“But, to me, something else has a meaning.”

“Well, what?”

“Why, what I have been trying, apparently without success, to explain.”

“But don’t you see that each of those things you call Goods, oughtn’t to be called Good at all, but each of them by some other particular name of its own?”

“Oh, I don’t want to quarrel about names; but I call each of them Good because from one point of view that of some particular individual each of them is something that ought to be. I, at any rate, admit no more than that. For each individual there is something that ought to be; but this, which ought to be for him, is very likely something that ought not to be for somebody else.”

On this Leslie threw himself back with a gesture of disgust and despair; and I took the opportunity of intervening.

“Let us have some concrete instances,” I said, “of these incompatible Goods.”

“By all means,” he replied, “nothing can be simpler. It is good, say, for Nero, to preserve supreme power; but it is bad for the people who come in his way. It is good for an American millionaire to make and increase his fortune; but it is bad for the people he ruins in the process. And so on, ad infinitum; one has only to look at the world to see that the Goods of individuals are not only diverse but incompatible one with another.”

“Of course,” I said, “it is true that people do hold things to be good which are in this way mutually incompatible. But does not the fact of this incompatibility make one suspect that perhaps the things in question are not really good?”

“It may, in some cases, but I see no ground for the suspicion. It may very well be that what is good for me is in the nature of things incompatible with what is good for you.”

“I don’t say it may not be so; but does one believe it to be so? Doesn’t one believe that what is really good for one must somehow be compatible with what is really good for others?”

“Some people may believe it, but many don’t; and it can never be proved.”

“No; and so I am driven back upon my argument ad hominem. Do not you, as a matter of fact, believe it?”

“No, I don’t know that I do.”

“Do you believe then that there is nothing which is good for people in general?”

“I don’t see what is to prevent my believing it.”

“But, at any rate you do not act as if you believed it.”

“In what way do I not?”

“Why, for instance, you said last night that you intended to enter Parliament.”

“Well?”

“And in a few weeks you will be making speeches all over the country in favour of well, I don’t quite know what shall we say in favour of the war?”

“Say so, by all means, if you like.”

“And this war, I presume, you believe to be a good thing?”

“Well?”

“Good, that is, not merely for yourself but for the world at large? or at least for the English or the Boers, or one or other of them? Do you admit that?”

“Oh,” he said, “I am nothing if not frank! At present, we will admit, I think the war a good thing (whatever that may mean); but what of that? Very probably I am wrong.”

“Very probably you are; but that is not the point. The main thing is, that you admit that it is possible to be wrong or right at all; that there is something to be wrong or right about.”

“But I don’t know that I do admit it, or, at any rate, that I shall always admit it. Probably, after changing my opinions again and again, I shall come to the conclusion that none of them are worth anything at all; that, in fact, there’s nothing to have an opinion about; and then I shall retire from politics altogether; and then then how will you get hold of me?”

“Oh,” I replied, “easily enough! For you will still continue, I suppose, to do some kind of work, and work which will necessarily affect innumerable people besides yourself; and you will believe, I presume, that somehow or other the work you do is contributing to some general Good?”

“‘You presume’! you do indeed presume! Suppose I believe nothing of the kind? Suppose I deny altogether a general Good?”

“We will suppose it, if you like,” I said. “And now let us go on to examine the consequences of the supposition.”

“By all means!” he said, “proceed!”

“Well,” I began, “since you are still living in society, (for that, I suppose, you allow me to assume,) you are, by the nature of the case, interchanging with others innumerable offices. At the same time, on the supposition we are adopting, that you deny a general Good, your only object in this interchange will be your own Good, (in which you admit that you do believe.) If, for example, you are a doctor, your aim, at the highest, is to develop yourself, to increase your knowledge, your skill, your self-control; at the lowest, it is to accumulate a fortune; but in neither case can your purpose be to alleviate or cure disease, nor to contribute to the advance of science; for that would be to suppose that these ends, although they purport to be general, nevertheless are somehow good, which is the hypothesis we were excluding. Similarly, if you are a lawyer, you will not set your heart on doing justice, or perfecting the law; such ends as these for you are mere illusions; for even if justice exist at all, it certainly is not a Good, for if it were, it would be a Good for all, and, as we agree, there is no such thing. Men like Bentham, therefore, to you will be mere visionaries, and the legal system as a whole will have no sense or purport, except so far as it contributes to sharpen your wits and fill your pocket And so, in general, with all professions and occupations; whichever you may adopt, you will treat it merely as a means to your own Good; and since you have no Good which is also common to other men, you will use these others without scruple to further what you conceive to be your own advantage, without necessarily paying any regard to what they may conceive to be theirs.”

“Well,” he said, “and why not?”

“I don’t ask ’why not’?” I replied, “I ask merely whether it would be so? whether you do, as a matter of fact, conceive it possible that you should ever adopt such an attitude?”

“Well, no,” he admitted, “I don’t think it is; but that is an idiosyncrasy of mine; and I have no doubt there are plenty of other men who are precisely in the position you describe. Take, for example, a man like the late Jay Gould. Do you suppose that he, in his business operations, ever had any regard for anything except his own personal advantage? Do you suppose he cared how many people he ruined? Do you suppose he cared even whether he ruined his country, except so far as such ruin might interfere with his own profit? Or look again at the famous Mr. Leiter of Chicago! What do you suppose it mattered to him that he might be starving half the world, and imperilling the governments of Europe? It was enough for him that he should realize a fortune; of all the rest, I suppose, he washed his hands. He and men like him adopt, I have no doubt, precisely the position which you are trying to show is impossible.”

“No,” I said, “I am not trying to show that it is impossible in general; I am only trying to show that it is impossible for you. And my object is to suggest that if a man does deny a general Good, he denies it, as I say, at his peril. If his denial is genuine, and not merely verbal, it will lead him to conduct of the kind I have described.”

“But surely,” interrupted Leslie, “you have no right to assume that a disbelief in a general Good, however genuine, necessarily involves a sheer egoism in conduct? For a man might find that his own Good consisted in furthering the Good of other people; and in that case of course he will try to further it.”

“But,” I replied, “on our hypothesis there is no Good of other people. Each individual, we agreed, has his Good, but there is no Good common to all. And thus we could have no guarantee that in furthering the Good of one we are also furthering that of others. So that even supposing a man to believe that his own Good consists in furthering the Good of others, yet he will not be able to put his belief into practice, but at most will be able to help some one man, with the likelihood that in so doing he is thwarting and injuring many others. Though, therefore, he may not wish to be an egoist, yet he cannot work for a common Good; and that simply because there is no common Good to work for.”

At this point Parry, who had been sitting silent during the discussion, probably because of its somewhat abstract character, suddenly broke in upon it as follows. He had a great fund of optimism and what is sometimes called common sense, which to me was rather pleasant and refreshing, though some of the others, and especially Leslie and Ellis, were apt, I think, to find it irritating. His present speech was characteristic of his manner.

“Ah!” he began, “there you touch upon the point which has vitiated your argument throughout. You seem to assume that because every man has his own Good, and there is no Good we can affirm to be common to all, therefore these individual Goods are incompatible one with another, so that a man who is intent on his own Good is necessarily hindering, or, at least, not helping, other people who are intent on theirs. But I believe, and my view is borne out by all experience, that exactly the opposite is the case. Every man, in pursuing his own advantage, is also enabling the rest to pursue theirs. The world, if you like to put it so, is a world of egoists; but a world constructed with such exquisite art, that the egoism of one is not only compatible with, but indispensable to that of another. On this principle all society rests. The producer, seeking his own profit, is bound to satisfy the consumer; the capitalist cannot exist without supporting the labourer; the borrower and lender are knit by the closest ties of mutual advantage; and so with all the ranks and divisions of mankind, social, political, economic, or what you will. Balanced, one against the other, in delicate counterpoise, in subtlest interaction of part with part, they sweep on in one majestic system, an equilibrium for ever disturbed, yet ever recovering itself anew, created, it is true, and maintained by countless individual impulses, yet summing up and reflecting all of these in a single, perfect, all-harmonious whole. And when we consider

But here he was interrupted by a kind of groan from Audubon; and Ellis, seeing his opportunity, broke in ironically, as follows:

“The theme, my dear Parry, is indeed a vast one, and suggests countless developments. When, for example, we consider (to borrow your own phrase) the reciprocal relations of the householder and the thief, of the murderer and his victim, of the investor and the fraudulent company-promoter; when, turning from these private examples, we cast our eyes on international relations, when we observe the perfect accord of interest between all the great powers in the far East; when we note the smooth harmonious working of that flawless political machine so aptly named the European Concert, each member pursuing its own advantage, yet co-operating without friction to a common end; or when, reverting to the economic sphere, we contemplate the exquisite adjustment that prevails between the mutual interest of labour and capital an adjustment broken only now and again by an occasional disturbance, just to show that the centre of gravity is changing; when we observe the World Trust quietly, without a creak or a groan, annihilating the individual producer; or when, to take the sublime example which has already been quoted, we perceive a single individual, in the pursuit of his own Good, positively co-operating with revolutionists on the other side of the globe, and contributing, by the process of starvation, to the deliverance of a great and oppressed people if indeed, in such a world as ours, anyone can be said to be oppressed when, my dear Parry, we contemplate these things, then then words fail me! Finish the sentence as you only can.”

“Oh,” said Parry, good-naturedly enough, “of course I know very well you can make anything ridiculous if you like. But I still maintain that we must take broad views of these matters, and that the position adopted is substantially correct, if you take long enough periods of time. Every man in the long run by pursuing his own Good does contribute also to the Good of others.”

“Well,” I said, anxious to keep the argument to the main point, “let us admit for the moment that it is so. You assert, then, that everyone’s Good is distinct from everyone else’s, and that there is no common Good; but that each one’s pursuit of his own Good is essential to the realization of the Good of all the rest”

“Yes,” he said; “roughly, that is the kind of thing I believe.”

“Well, but,” I continued, “on that system there is at least one thing which we shall have to call a common Good.”

“And what is that?”

“Society itself! For society is the condition indispensable to all alike for the realization of any individual Good; and a common condition of Good is, I suppose, in a sense, a common Good.”

“Yes,” he replied, “I suppose, in a sense, it is.”

“Well,” I said, “I want no larger admission. For under ‘society’ what is not included! Sanction society, and you sanction, or at least you admit the possibility of a sanction for every kind of common activity and end; and the motives of men in undertaking these common activities become a matter of comparative indifference. Whatever they are consciously aiming at, whether it be their own Good, or the Good of all, or, as is more probable, a varying mixture of both, the fact remains that they do, and we do, admit a common Good, the maintenance and development of society itself. And that is all I was concerned to get you to agree to.”

“But,” said Leslie, “do you really think that there is no common Good except this, which you yourself admit to be rather a condition of Good than Good itself?”

“No,” I replied, “that is not my view. I do not, myself, regard society as nothing but a condition of the realization of independent, individual Goods. On the contrary, I think that the Good of each individual consists in his relations with other individuals. But this I do not know that I am in a position to establish. Meantime, however, we can, I think, maintain, that few candid men, understanding the issue, will really deny altogether a common Good; for they will have to admit that in society we have at the very least a common condition of Good.”

“But still,” objected Leslie, “even so we have no proof that there is a common Good, but only that most civilized men, if pressed, would probably admit one.”

“Certainly,” I replied, “and I pretend nothing more. I have not attempted to prove that there is a common Good, nor even that it is impossible not to believe in one. I merely wished to show, as before, that if a man disbelieves, he disbelieves, so to speak, at his own peril. And to sum up the argument, what I think we have shown is, that to deny a common Good is, in the first place, to deny to one’s life and action all worth except what is bound up with one’s own Good, to the complete exclusion of any Good of all. In the second place, it is to deny all worth to every public and social institution to religion, law, government, the family, all activities, in a word, which contribute to and make up what we call society. Further, it is to empty history, which is the record of society, of its main interest and significance, and in particular to eliminate the idea of progress; for progress, of course, implies a common Good towards which progress is directed. In brief, it is to strip a man of his whole social self, and reveal him a poor, naked, shivering Ego, implicated in relations from which he may derive what advantage he can for himself, but which, apart from that advantage, have no point or purport or aim; it is to make him an Egoist even against his will; leaving him for his solitary ideal a cult of self-development, deprived of its main attraction by its dissociation from the development of others. Now, if any man, having a full sense of what is implied in his words (a sense, not merely conceived by the intellect, but felt, as it were, in every nerve and tissue) will seriously and deliberately deny that he believes in a common Good; if he will not merely make the denial with his lips, but actually carry it out in his daily life, adjusting to his verbal proposition his habitual actions, feelings, and thoughts; if he will and can really and genuinely do this, then I, for my part, am willing to admit that I cannot prove him to be wrong. All I can do is to set my experience against his, and to appeal to the experience of others; and we must wait till further experience on either side leads (if it ever is to lead) to an agreement. But, on the other hand, if a man merely makes the denial with his lips, because, perhaps, he conceives it impossible to prove the opposite, or because he sees that what is good cannot be defined beyond dispute, or whatever other plausible reason he may have; and if, while he persists in his denial, he continues to act as if the contrary were true, taking part with zest and enthusiasm in the common business of life, pushing causes, supporting institutions, subscribing to societies, and the like, and that without any pretence that in so doing he is seeking merely his own Good in that case I shall take leave to think that he does not really believe what he says (though no doubt he may genuinely think he does), and I shall take his life and his habits, the whole tissue of his instincts and desires, as a truer index to his real opinion than the propositions he enunciates with his lips.”

“But,” cried Leslie, “that is a mere appeal to prejudice! Of course we all want to believe that there is a common Good; the question is, whether we have a right to.”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “but the question I wished to raise was the more modest one, whether we can help it? Whether we have a right or no is another matter, more difficult and more profound than I care to approach at present. If, indeed, it could be proved beyond dispute to the reason, either that certain things are good or that they are not, there would be no place for such discussions as this. But, it appears, such proof has not yet been given, or do you think it has?”

“No!” he said, “but I think it might be and must be!”

“Possibly,” I said, “but meantime, perhaps, it is wiser to fall back on this kind of reasoning which you call an appeal to prejudice, and so no doubt in a sense it is; for it is an appeal to the passion men have to find worth in their lives, and their refusal to accept any view by which such worth is denied. To anyone who refuses to accept any judgment about what is good, I prove, or endeavour to prove, that such refusal cuts away the whole basis of his life; and I ask him if he is prepared to accept that consequence. If he affirms that he is, and affirms it not only with his lips but in his action, then I have no more to say; but if he cannot accept the consequences, then, I suppose, he will reconsider the prémisses, and admit that he does really believe that judgments about what is good may be true, and, provisionally, that his own are true, or at least as true as he can make them, and that he does in fact accept and act upon them as true, and intends to do so until he is convinced that they are false. And this attitude of his feelings, you may call, if you like, an attitude of faith; it is, I think, the attitude most men would adopt if they were pressed home upon the subject; and to my mind it is reasonable enough, and rather to be praised than to be condemned.”

“I don’t think so at all,” cried Leslie, “I consider it very unsatisfactory.”

“So do I,” said Parry, “and for my part, I can’t see what you’re all driving at. You seem to be making a great fuss about nothing.”

“Oh no!” retorted Ellis, “not about nothing! about a really delightful paradox! We have arrived at the conclusion that we are bound to believe in Good, but that we haven’t the least notion what it is!”

“Exactly!” said Parry, “and that is just what I dispute!”

“What? That we are bound to believe in Good?”

“No! But that we don’t know what Good is, or rather, what things are good.”

“Oh!” I cried, “do you really think we do know? I wish I could think that! The trouble with me is, that while I seem to see that we are bound to trust our judgments about what is good, yet I cannot see that we know that they are true. Indeed, from their very diversity, it seems as if they could not all be true. My only hope is, that perhaps they do all contain some truth, although they may contain falsehood as well.”

“But surely,” said Parry, “you exaggerate the difficulty. All the confusion seems to me to arise from the assumption that we can’t see what lies under our noses. I don’t believe, myself, that there is all this difficulty in discovering Good. Philosophers always assume, as you seem to be doing, that it is all a matter of opinion and reasoning, and that opinions and reasons really determine conduct. Whereas in fact, I believe, conduct is determined, at least in essentials, by something very much more like instinct. And it is to this instinct which, by the nature of the case, is simple and infallible, that we ought to look to tell us what is good, and not to our reason, which, as you admit yourself, can only land us in contradictory judgments. I know, of course, that you have a prejudice against any such view.”

“Not at all!” I said, “if only I could understand it. I should be glad of any simple and infallible criterion; only I have never yet been able to find one.”

“That, I believe, is because you look for it in the wrong place; or, perhaps, because you look for it instead of simply seeing it. You will never discover what is good by any process of rational inquiry. It’s a matter of direct perception, above and beyond all argument.”

“Perhaps it is,” I said, “but surely not of perception, as you said, simple and infallible?”

“If not that, at least sufficiently clear and distinct for all practical purposes. And to my mind, all discussion about Good is for this reason rather factitious and unreal. I don’t mean to say, of course, that it isn’t amusing, among ourselves, to pass an hour or two in this kind of talk; but I should think it very unfortunate if the habit of it were to spread among the mass of men. For inquiry does tend in the long run to influence opinion, and generally to influence it in the wrong way; whereas, if people simply go on following their instinct, they are much more likely to do what is right, than if they try to act on so-called rational grounds.”

“But,” cried Leslie, who during this speech had found obvious difficulty in containing himself, “what is this instinct which you bid us follow? What authority has it? What validity? What is its content? What is it, anyhow, that it should be set up in this way above reason?”

“As to authority,” replied Parry, “the point about an instinct is, that its authority is unimpeachable. It commands and we obey; there’s no question about it.”

“But there is question about the content of Good.”

“I should rather say that we make question. But, after all, how small a part of our life is affected by our theories! As a rule, we act simply and without reflection; and such action is the safest and most prosperous.”

“The safest and most prosperous! But how do you know that? What standard are you applying? Where do you get it from?”

“From common sense.”

“And what is common sense?”

“Oh, a kind of instinct too!”

“A kind of instinct? How many are there then? And does every instinct require another to justify it, and so ad infinitum?”

“Logomachy, my dear Leslie!” cried Parry, with imperturbable good-humour. He had a habit of treating Leslie as if he were a clever child.

“But really, Parry,” I interposed, “this is the critical point. Is it your view that an instinct is its own sufficient justification, or does it require justification by something else?”

“No,” he said, “it justifies itself. Take, for example, a strong instinct, like that of self-preservation. How completely it stands above all criticism! Not that it cannot be criticised in a kind of dilettante, abstract way; but in the moment of action the criticism simply disappears in face of the overwhelming fact it challenges.”

“Do you mean to say, then,” said Leslie, “that because this instinct is so strong therefore it is always good to follow it?”

“I should say so, generally speaking.”

“How is it, then, that you consider it disgraceful that a man should run away in battle?”

“Ah!” replied Parry, “that is a very interesting point! There you get a superposition of the social upon the merely individual instinct.”

“And how does that come about?”

“That may be a matter of some dispute; but it has been ingeniously explained as follows. We start with the primary instinct of self-preservation. This means, at first, that each individual strives to preserve himself. But as time goes on individuals discover that they can only preserve themselves by associating with others, and that they must defend society if they want to defend themselves. They thus form a habit of defending society; and this habit becomes in time a second instinct, and an instinct so strong that it even overrides the primary one from which it was derived; till at last you get individuals sacrificing in defence of the community those very lives which they originally entered the community to preserve.”

“What a charming paradox!” cried Ellis. “And so it is really true that every soldier who dies on the field of battle does so only by virtue of a miscalculation? And if he could but pull himself up and remember that, after all, the preservation of his life was the only motive that induced him to endanger it, he would run away like a sensible man, and try some other device to achieve his end, the device of society having evidently broken down, so far as he is concerned.”

“There you are again,” said Parry, “with your crude rationalism! The point is that the social habit has now become an instinct, and has therefore, as I say, imperative authority! No operations of the reason touch it in the least”

“Well,” rejoined Ellis, “I must say that it seems to me very hard that a man can’t rectify such an important error. The imposition is simply monstrous! Here are a number of fellows shut up in society on the distinct understanding, to begin with, that society was to help them to preserve their lives; instead of which, it starves them and hangs them and sends them to be shot in battle, and they aren’t allowed to raise a word of protest or even to perceive what a fraud is being perpetrated upon them!”

“I don’t see that it’s hard at all,” replied Parry; “it seems to me a beautiful device of nature to ensure the predominance of the better instincts.”

“The better instincts!” I cried, “but there is the point! These instincts of yours, it seems, conflict; in battle, for example, the instinct to run away conflicts with the instinct to stay and fight?”

“No doubt,” he admitted.

“And sometimes one prevails and sometimes the other?”

“Yes.”

“And in the one case we say that the man does right, when he stays and fights; and in the other that he does wrong, when he runs away?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, then, how does your theory of instincts help us to know what is Good? For it seems that after all we have to choose between instincts, to approve one and condemn another. And our problem still remains, how can we do this? how can we get any certainty of standard?”

“Perhaps the faculty that judges is itself an instinct?”

“Perhaps it is,” I replied, “I don’t really know what an instinct is. My quarrel is not with the word instinct, but with what seemed to be your assumption that whatever it is in us that judges about Good judges in a single, uniform, infallible way. Whereas, in fact, as you had to admit, sometimes at the same moment it pronounces judgments not only diverse but contradictory.”

“But,” he replied, “those seem to me to be exceptional cases. As a rule the difficulty doesn’t occur. When it does, I admit that we require a criterion. But I should expect to find it in science rather than in philosophy.”

“In science!” exclaimed Leslie. “What has science to do with it?”

“What has not science to do with?” said a new voice from behind. It was Wilson who, in his turn, had joined us from the breakfast room (he always breakfasted late), and had overheard the last remark. He was a lecturer in Biology at Cambridge, rather distinguished in that field, and an enthusiastic believer in the capacity of the scientific method to solve all problems.

“I was saying,” Leslie repeated in answer to his question, “that science has nothing to do with the Good.”

“So much the worse for the Good,” rejoined Wilson, “if indeed that be true.”

“But you, I suppose, would never admit that it is,” I interposed. I was anxious to hear what he had to say, though at the same time I was desirous to avoid a discussion between him and Leslie, for their types of mind and habits of thought were so radically opposed that it was as idle for them to engage in debate as for two bishops of opposite colour to attempt to capture one another upon a chessboard. He answered readily enough to my challenge.

“I think,” he said, “that there is only one method of knowledge, and that is the method we call scientific.”

“But do you think there is any knowledge of Good at all, even by that method? or that there is nothing but erroneous opinions?”

“I think,” he replied, “that there is a possibility of knowledge, but only if we abjure dialectics. Here, as everywhere, the only safe guide is the actual concrete operation of Nature.”

“How do you mean?” asked Leslie, his voice vibrating with latent hostility.

“I mean that the real significance of what we call Good is only to be ascertained by observing the course of Nature; Good being in fact identical with the condition towards which she tends, and morality the means to attaining it.”

“But ” Leslie was beginning, when Parry cut him short.

“Wait a moment!” he said. “Let Wilson have a fair hearing!”

“This end and this means,” continued Wilson, “we can only ascertain by a study of the facts of animal and human evolution. Biology and Sociology, throwing light back and forward upon one another, are rapidly superseding the pseudo-science of Ethics.”

“Oh dear!” cried Ellis, sotto-voce, “here comes the social organism! I knew it would be upon us sooner or later.”

“And though at present, I admit,” proceeded Wilson, not hearing, or ignoring, this interruption, “we are hardly in a position to draw any certain conclusions, yet to me, at least, it seems pretty clear what kind of results we shall arrive at.”

“Yes!” cried Parry, eagerly, “and what are they?”

“Well,” replied Wilson, “I will indicate, if you like, the position I am inclined to take up, though of course it must be regarded as provisional.”

“Of course! Pray go on!”

“Well,” he proceeded, “biology, as you know, starts with the single cell

“How do you spell it?” said Ellis, with shameless frivolity, “with a C or with an S?”

“Of these cells,” continued Wilson, imperturbably, “every animal body is a compound or aggregation; the aggregation involving a progressive modification in the structure of each cell, the differentiation of groups of cells to perform special functions, digestive, respiratory, and the rest, and the subordination of each cell or group of cells to the whole. Similarly, in sociology

“Dear Wilson,” cried Ellis, unable any longer to contain himself, “mightn’t we take all this for granted?”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “let him finish his analogy.”

“That’s just it!” cried Leslie, “it’s nothing but an analogy. And I don’t see how

“Hush, hush!” said Parry. “Do let him speak!”

“I was about to say,” continued Wilson, “when I was interrupted, that in the social organism

“Ah!” interjected Ellis, “here it is!”

“In the social organism, the individual corresponds to the cell, the various trades and professions to the organs. Society has thus its alimentary system, in the apparatus of production and exchange; its circulatory system, in the network of communications; its nervous system, in the government machinery; its

“By the bye,” interrupted Ellis, “could you tell me, for I never could find it in Herbert Spencer, what exactly in society corresponds to the spleen?”

“Or the liver?” added Leslie.

“Or the vermiform appendix?” Ellis pursued.

“Oh, well,” said Wilson, a little huffed at last, “if you are tired of being serious it’s no use for me to continue.”

“I’m sorry, Wilson!” said Ellis. “I won’t do it again; but one does get a little tired of the social organism.”

“More people talk about it,” answered Wilson, “than really understand it.”

“Very true,” retorted Ellis, “especially among biologists.”

At this point I began to fear we should lose our subject in polemics; so I ventured to recall Wilson to the real issue.

“Supposing,” I said, “that we grant the whole of your position, how does it help us to judge what is good?”

“Why,” he said, “in this way. What we learn from biology is, that it is the constant effort of nature to combine cells into individuals and individuals into societies the protozoon, in other words, evolves into the animal, the animal into what some have called the ‘hyper-zoon,’ or super-organism. Well, now, to this physical evolution corresponds a psychical one. What kind of consciousness an animal may have, we can indeed only conjecture; and we cannot even go so far as conjecture in the case of the cell; but we may reasonably assume that important psychical changes of the original elements are accompaniments and conditions of their aggregation into larger entities; and the morality (if you will permit the word) of the cell that is incorporated in an animal body will consist in adapting itself as perfectly as may be to the new conditions, in subordinating its consciousness to that of the Whole briefly, in acquiring a social instead of an individual self. And now, to follow the clue thus obtained into the higher manifestations of life. As the cell is to the animal, so is the individual to society, and that on the psychical as well as on the physical side. Nature has perfected the animal; she is perfecting society; that is the end and goal of all her striving. When, therefore, you raise the question, what is Good, biology has this simple answer to give you: Good is the perfect social soul in the perfect social body.”

As he concluded, Ellis exclaimed softly,"‘Parturiunt montés,’” and Leslie took it up with: “And not even a mouse!”

“Whether it is a mouse or no,” I said, “it would be hard to say, until we had examined it more closely. At present it seems to me more like a cloud, which may or may not conceal the goddess Truth. But the question I really want to ask is, What particular advantage Wilson gets from the biological method? For the conclusion itself, I suppose, might have been reached, and commonly is, without any recourse to the aid of natural science.”

“No doubt,” he said, “but my contention is, that it is only by the scientific method that you get proof. You, for example, may assert that you believe the social virtues ought to prevail over individual passions; but if your position were challenged, I don’t see how you would defend it. Whereas I can simply point to the whole evolution of Nature as tending towards the Good I advocate; and can say: if you resist that tendency you are resisting Nature herself!”

“But isn’t it rather odd,” said Ellis, “that we should be able to resist Nature?”

“Not at all,” he replied, “for our very resistance is part of the plan; it’s the lower stage persisting into the higher, but destined sooner or later to be absorbed.”

“I see,” I said, “and the keynote of your position is, as you said at the beginning, that Good is simply what Nature wants. So that, instead of looking within to find our criterion, we ought really to look without, to discover, if we can, the tendency of Nature and to acquiesce in that as the goal of our aspiration.”

“Precisely,” he replied, “that is the position.”

“Well,” I said, “it is plausible enough; but the plausibility, I am inclined to think, comes from the fact that you have been able to make out, more or less, that the tendency of Nature is in the direction which, on the whole, we prefer.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well,” I said, “supposing your biological researches had led you to just the opposite conclusion, that the tendency of Nature was not from the cell to the animal, and from the individual to society, but in precisely the reverse direction, so that the end of all things was a resolution into the primitive elements do you think you would have been as ready to assert that it is the goal of Nature that must determine our ideal of Good?”

“But why consider such a hypothetical case?”

“I am not so sure,” I replied, “that it is more hypothetical than the other. At any rate it is a hypothesis adopted by one of your authorities. Mr. Herbert Spencer, you will remember, conceives the process of Nature to be one, not, as you appear to think, of continuous progress, but rather of a circular movement, from the utmost simplicity to the utmost complexity of Being, and back again to the original condition. What you were describing is the movement which we call upward, and which we can readily enough believe to be good, at any rate upon a superficial view of it. But now, suppose us to have reached the point at which the opposite movement begins; suppose what we had to look forward to and to describe as the course of Nature were a process, not from simple to complex, from homogeneous to heterogeneous, or whatever the formula may be, but one in exactly the contrary direction, a dissolution of society into its individuals, of animals into the cells of which they are composed, of life into chemistry, of chemistry into mechanism, and so on through the scale of Being, reversing the whole course of evolution should we, in such a case, still have to say that the process of Nature was right, and that she is to give the law to our judgment about Good?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I think we should; and for this reason. Only those who do on the whole approve the course of Nature have the qualities enabling them to survive; the others will, in the long run, be eliminated. There is thus a constant tendency to harmonize opinions with the actual process of the world; and that, no doubt, is why we approve what you call the upward movement, which is the one in which Nature is at present engaged. But, for the same reason, if, or when, a movement in the opposite direction should set in, people holding opinions like ours will tend to be eliminated, while those will tend to survive more and more who approve the current of evolution then prevailing.”

“And in this way,” said Ellis, “an exquisite unanimity will be at last attained, by the simple process of eliminating the dissentients!”

“Precisely!”

“Well,” cried Leslie, “no doubt that will be very satisfactory for the people who survive; but it does not help us much. What we want to know is, what we are to judge to be Good, not what somebody else will be made to judge, centuries hence.”

“And for my part,” said Ellis, “I’m not much impressed by the argument you attribute to Nature, that if we don’t agree with her we shall be knocked on the head. I, for instance, happen to object strongly to her whole procedure: I don’t much believe in the harmony of the final consummation even if it were to be final, and not merely the turn of the tide; and I am sensibly aware of the horrible discomfort of the intermediate stages, the pushing, kicking, trampling of the host, and the wounded and dead left behind on the march. Of all this I venture to disapprove; then comes Nature and says, ‘but you ought to approve!’ I ask why, and she says, ‘Because the procedure is mine.’ I still demur, and she comes down on me with a threat ’Very good, approve or no, as you like; but if you don’t approve you will be eliminated!’ ’By all means,’ I say, and cling to my old opinion with the more affection that I feel myself invested with something of the glory of a martyr. Nature, it seems, is waiting for me round the corner because I venture to stick to my principles. ‘Ruat caelum!’ I cry; and in my humble opinion it’s Nature, not I, that cuts a poor figure!”

“My dear Ellis,” protested Wilson, “what’s the use of talking like that? It’s not really sublime, it’s only ridiculous!”

“Certainly!” retorted Ellis; “it’s you who are sublime. I prefer the ridiculous.”

“So,” I said, “does Wilson, if one may judge by appearances. For I cannot help thinking he is really laughing at us.”

“Not at all,” he replied, “I am perfectly serious.”

“But surely,” I said, “you must see that any discussion about Good must turn somehow upon our perception of it? The course of Nature may, as you say, be good; but Nature cannot be the measure of Good; the measure can only be Good itself; and the most that the study of Nature could do would be to illuminate our perception by giving it new material for judgment. Judge we must, in the last resort; and the judgment can never be a mere statement as to the course which Nature is pursuing.”

“Well,” said Wilson, “but you will admit at least the paramount importance of the study of Nature, if we are ever to form a right judgment?”

“I feel much more strongly,” I replied, “the importance of the study of Man; however, we need not at present discuss that. All that I wanted to insist upon was, that the contention which you have been trying to sustain, that it is possible, somehow or other, to get rid of the subjectivity of our judgments about Good by substituting for them a statement about the tendencies of Nature that this contention cannot be upheld.”

“If that be so,” he said, “I don’t see how you are ever to get a scientific basis for your judgment.”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “that we can. It depends upon what you include under science.”

“Oh,” he said, “by science I mean the resumption in brief formulae of the sequence of phenomena; or, more briefly, a description of what happens.”

“If that be so,” I replied, “the method of judging about Good can certainly not be scientific; for judgments about Good are judgments of what ought to be, not of what is.”

“But then,” objected Wilson, “what method is left you? You have nothing to fall back upon but a chaos of opinions.”

“But might there not be some way of judging between opinions?”

“How should there be, in the absence of any external objective test?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why,” he replied, “the kind of test which you have in the case of the sciences. They depend, in the last resort, not on ideas of ours, but on the routine of common sense-perception; a routine which is independent of our choice or will, but is forced upon us from without with an absolute authority such as no imaginings of our own can impugn. Thus we get a certainty upon which, by the power of inference, whose mechanism we need not now discuss, we are able to build up a knowledge of what is. But when, on the other hand, we turn to such of our ideas as deal with the Good, the Beautiful, and the like here we have no test external to ourselves, no authority superior and independent. Invite a group of men to witness a scientific experiment, and none of them will be able to deny either the sequence of the phenomena produced, or the chain of reasoning (supposing it to be sound) which leads to the conclusion based upon them. Invite the same men to judge of a picture, or consult them on a question of moral casuistry, and they will propound the most opposite opinions; nor will there be any objective test by which you can affirm that one opinion is more correct than another. The deliverances of the external sense are, or at least can be made, by correction of the personal equation, infallible and the same for all; those of the internal sense are different not only in different persons, but in the same person at different times.”

“Yes,” said Leslie, impatiently, “we have all admitted that! The question is whether

“Excuse me,” Wilson interposed, “I haven’t yet come to my main point. I was going to say that not merely are there these differences of opinion, but even if there were not, even if the opinions were uniform, they would still, as opinions, be subjective and devoid of scientific validity. It is the external reference that gives its certainty to science; and such a reference is impossible in the case of judgments about the Beautiful and the Good. Such judgments are merely records of what we think or feel. These ideas of ours may or may not happen to be consistent one with another; but whether they are so or not, they are merely our ideas, and have nothing to do with the essential nature of reality.”

“I am not sure,” I replied, “that the distinction really holds in the way in which you put it. Let us take for a moment the point of view of God only for the sake of argument,” I added, seeing him about to protest. “God, we will suppose, knows all Being through and through as it really is; and along with this knowledge of reality he has a conviction that reality is good. Now, with this conviction of his none other, ex hypothesi, can compete; for he being God, we must at any rate admit that if anybody can be right, it must be he. No one then can dispute or shake his opinion; and since he is eternal he will not change it of himself. Is there then, under the circumstances, any distinction of validity between his judgment that what is, is, and his judgment that what is, is good?”

“I don’t see the use,” he replied, “of considering such an imaginary case. But if you press me I can only say that I still adhere to my view that any judgment about Good, whether made by God or anybody else, can be no more than a subjective expression of opinion.”

“But,” I rejoined, “in a sense, all certainty is subjective, in so far as the certainty has to be perceived. It is impossible to eliminate the Subject. In the case, for example, upon which you dwelt, of the impressions of external sense, the certainty of the impressions is your and my certainty that we have them; and so in the case of a cogent argument; for any given person the test of the cogency is his perception that the cogency is there. And it is the same with the Beautiful and the Good; there is no conceivable test except perception. Our difficulty here is simply that perceptions conflict; not that we have no independent test. But if, as in the case I imagined, the perception of Good was harmonious with itself, then the certainty on that point would be as final and complete as the certainty in the proof of a proposition of Euclid.”

“I am afraid,” said Wilson, “I don’t follow you. You’re beginning to talk metaphysics.”

“Call it what you will,” I replied, “so long only as it is sense.”

“No doubt,” he said, “but I don’t feel sure that it is.”

“In that case you can show me where I am wrong.”

“No,” he replied, “for, as I said, I can’t follow you.”

“He means he won’t,” said Ellis, breaking in with his usual air of an unprejudiced outsider, “But after all, what does it really matter? Whatever the reason may be for our uncertainty as to Good, the fact remains that we are uncertain. There’s my Good, thy Good, his Good, our Good, your Good, their Good; and all these Goods in process of flux, according to the time of day, the time of life, and the state of the liver. That being so, what is the use of discussing Good in itself? And why be so disturbed about it? There’s Leslie, for instance, looking as if the bottom were knocked out of the universe because he can’t discover his objective standard! My dear boy, life goes on just the same, my life, his life, your life, all the lives. Why not make an end of the worry at once by admitting frankly that Good is a chimaera, and that we get on very well without it?”

“But I don’t get on well without it!” Leslie protested.

“No,” I said, “and I hoped that by this time we were agreed that none of us could. But Ellis is incorrigible.”

“You don’t suppose,” he replied, “that I am going to agree with you merely because you override me in argument even if you did, which you don’t.”

“But at least,” cried Leslie, “you needn’t tell us so often that you disagree.”

“Very well,” he said, “I am dumb.” And for a moment there was silence, till I began to fear that our argument would collapse; when, to my relief, Parry returned to the charge.

“You will think me,” he began, “as obstinate as Ellis; but I can’t help coming back to my old point of view. Somehow or other, I feel sure you are making a difficulty which the practical man does not really feel. You object to my saying that he knows what is good by instinct; but somehow or other I am sure that he does know it. And what I suggest now is, that he finds it written in experience.”

“In whose experience?” Leslie asked defiantly.

“In that of the race, or, at least, in that of his own age and country. Now, do be patient a moment, and let me explain! What I want to suggest is, that every civilization worth the name possesses, in its laws and institutions, in the customs it blindly follows, the moral code it instinctively obeys, an actual objective standard, worked out in minute detail, of what, in every department of life, really is good. To this standard every plain man, without reasoning, and even without reflexion, does in fact simply and naturally conform; so do all of us who are discussing here, in all the common affairs of our daily life. We know, if I may say so, better than we know; and the difficulties into which we are driven, in speculations such as that upon which we are engaged, arise, to my mind, from a false and unnecessary abstraction from putting aside all the rich content of actual life, and calling into the wilderness for the answer to a question which solves itself in the street and the market-place.”

“Well,” I said, “for my own part, I am a good deal in sympathy with what you say. At the same time there is a difficulty.”

“A difficulty!” cried Leslie, “there are hundreds and thousands!”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “but the particular one to which I was referring is this. Every civilization, no doubt, has its own standard of Good; but these standards are different and even opposite; so that it would seem we require some criterion by which to compare and judge them.”

“No,” cried Parry, “that is just what I protest against. We are not concerned with other ideals than our own. Every great civilization believes in itself. Take, for instance, the ancient Greeks, of whom you are so fond of talking. In my opinion they are absurdly over-estimated; but they had at least that good quality they believed in themselves. To them the whole non-Greek world was barbarian; the standard of Good was frankly their own standard; and it was a standard knowable and known, however wide might be the deviations from it in practice. We find accordingly that for them the ideal was rooted in the real. Plato, even, in constructing his imaginary republic, does not build in the void, evoking from his own consciousness a Cloud-Cuckoo-city for the Birds; on the contrary, he bases his structure upon the actual, following the general plan of the institutions of Sparta and Crete; and neither to him nor to Aristotle does it ever occur that there is, or could be, any form of state worth considering, except the city-state with which they were familiar. It is the same with their treatment of ethics; their ideal is that of the Greeks, not of Man in general, and stands in close relation to the facts of contemporary life. So, too, with their art; it is not, like that of our modern romanticists, an impotent yearning for vaguely-imagined millenniums. On the contrary, it is an ideal interpretation of their own activity, a mirror focussing into feature and form the very same fact which they saw distorted and blurred in the troubled stream of time. The Good, in the Greek world, was simply the essence and soul of the Real; and the Socrates of Xenophon who frankly identified justice with the laws, was only expressing, and hardly with exaggeration, the current convictions of his countrymen. That, to my mind, is the attitude of health; and it is the one natural to the plain man in every well-organized society. Good is best known when it is not investigated; and people like ourselves would do no useful service if we were to induce in others the habit of discussion which education has made a second nature to ourselves.”

“My dear Parry!” cried Ellis, “you alarm me! Is it possible that we are all anarchists in disguise?”

“Parry,” I observed, “seems to agree with the view attributed by Browning to Paracelsus, that thought is disease, and natural health is ignorance.”

“Well,” rejoined Ellis, “there is a good deal to be said for that.”

“There’s a good deal to be said for everything,” I rejoined. “But if thought indeed be disease, we must recognise the fact that we are suffering from it; and so, I fear, is the whole modern world. It was easy for the Greeks to be ‘healthy’; practically they had no past. But for us the past overweights the present; we cannot, if we would, get rid of the burden of it. All that was once absolute has become relative, including our own conceptions and ideals; and as we look back down the ages and see civilization after civilization come into being, flourish and decay, it is impossible for us to believe that the society in which we happen to be born is more ultimate than any of these, or that its ideal, as reflected in its institutions, has any more claim than theirs to be regarded as a final and absolute expression of Good.”

“Well,” said Parry, “let us admit, if you like, that ideals evolve, but, in any case, the ideal of our own time has more validity for us than any other. As to those of the past, they were, no doubt, important in their day, but they have no importance for the modern world. The very fact that they are past is proof that they are also superseded.”

“What!” cried Leslie, indignantly, “do you mean to say that everything that is later in time is also better? That we are better artists than the Greeks? better citizens than the Romans? more spiritual than the men of the Middle Ages? more vigorous than those of the Renaissance?”

“I don’t know,” replied Parry, “that I am bound to maintain all that. I only say that on the whole I believe that ideals progress; and that therefore it is the ideals of our own time, and that alone, which we ought practically to consider.”

“The ideal of our own time?” I said, “but which of them? there are so many.”

“No, there is really only one, as I said before; the one that is embodied in current laws and customs.”

“But these are always themselves in process of change.”

“Yes, gradual change.”

“Not necessarily gradual; and even if it were, still change. And to sanction a change, however slight, may always mean, in the end, the sanctioning of a whole revolution.”

“Besides,” cried Leslie, “even if there were anything finally established, what right have we to judge that the established is the Good?”

“I don’t know that we have any right; but I am sure it is what we do.”

“Perhaps we do, many of us,” I said, “but always, so far as we reflect, with a lurking sense that we may be all wrong. Or how else do you account for the curious, almost physical, sinking and disquiet we are apt to experience in the presence of a bold denier?”

“I don’t know that I do experience it.”

“Do you not? I do so often; and only yesterday I had a specially vivid experience of the kind.”

“What was that?”

“Well, I was reading Nietzsche.”

“Who is he?”

“A German writer. It does not much matter, but I had him in my mind when I was speaking.”

“Well, but what does he say?”

“It’s not so much what he says, as what he denies.”

“What does he deny, then?”

“Everything that you, I suppose, would assert. I should conjecture, at least, that you believe in progress, democracy, and all the rest of it.”

“Well?”

“Well, he repudiates all that. Everything that you would reckon as progress, he reckons as decadence. Democracy he regards, with all that it involves, as a revolt of the weak against the strong, of the bad against the good, of the herd against the master. Every great society, in his view, is aristocratic, and aristocratic in the sense that the many are deliberately and consciously sacrificed to the few; and that, not as a painful necessity, but with a good conscience, in free obedience to the universal law of the world. ‘Be strong, be hard’ are his ultimate ethical principles. The modern virtues, or what we affect to consider such, sympathy, pity, justice, thrift, unselfishness and the like, are merely symptoms of moral degeneration. The true and great and noble man is above all things selfish; and the highest type of humanity is to be sought in Napoleon or Cæsar Borgia.”

“But that’s mere raving!”

“So you are pleased to say; and so, indeed, it really may be. But not simply because it contradicts those current notions which we are embodying, as fast as we can, in our institutions. It is precisely those notions that it challenges; and it is idle to meet it with a bare denial.”

“I can conceive no better way of meeting it!”

“Perhaps, for purposes of battle. Yet, even so, you would surely be stronger if you had reason for your faith.”

“But I think my reason sufficient those are not the ideas of the age.”

“But for all you know they may be those of the next.”

“Well, that will be its concern.”

“But surely, on your own theory, it must also be yours; for you said that the later was also the better. And the better, I suppose, is what you want to attain.”

“Well!”

“Well then, in supporting the ideas and institutions generally current, you may be hindering instead of helping the realization of the Good you want to achieve.”

“But I don’t believe Nietzsche’s ideas ever could represent the Good!”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t.”

“But, at any rate, do you abandon the position that we can take the ideas of our time as a final criterion?”

“I suppose so I don’t know I’m sure there’s something in it! Do you believe yourself that they have no import for us?”

“I didn’t say that; but I think we have to find what the import is. We cannot substitute for our own judgment the mere fact of a current convention, any more than we can substitute the mere fact of the tendency of Nature. For, after all, it is the part of a moral reformer to modify the convention. Or do you not think so?”

“Perhaps,” he admitted, “it may be!”

“Perhaps it may be!” cried Leslie, “but palpably it is! Is there any institution or law or opinion you could name which is not open to obvious criticism? Take what you will parliamentary government, the family, the law of real property is there one of them that could be adequately and successfully defended?”

“Certainly!” began Parry, with some indignation. “The family

“Oh,” I interrupted, “we are not yet in a position to discuss that! But upon one thing we seem to be agreed that whatever may be the value of current standards of Good in assisting our judgment, we cannot permit them simply to supersede it by an act of authority. And so once more we are thrown back each upon his own opinions.”

“To which, according to you,” interposed Parry, “we are bound to attach some validity.”

“And yet which we are aware,” added Ellis, “cannot possibly have any.”

I was about to protest against this remark when I saw, coming round from the garden, Bartlett and Dennis, the two remaining members of our party. They had just returned from a mountaineering expedition; and now, having had their bath, had come out to join us in our usual place of assembly. Bartlett had in his hand the Times and the Daily Chronicle. He was a keen business man, and a Radical politician of some note; and though not naturally inclined to speculative thought, would sometimes take part in our discussions if ever they seemed to touch on any practical issue. On these occasions his remarks were often very much to the point; but his manner being somewhat aggressive and polemic, his interposition did not always tend to make smooth the course of debate. It was therefore with mingled feelings of satisfaction and anxiety that I greeted his return. After some talk about their expedition, he turned to me and said, “We ought to apologise, I suppose, for interrupting a discussion?”

“Not at all!” I replied; “but, as you are here, perhaps you will be willing to help us?”

“Oh,” he said, “I leave that to Dennis. This kind of thing isn’t much in my line.”

“What kind of thing?” Leslie interjected. “I don’t believe you even know what we’re talking about!”

“Talking about. Why, philosophy, of course! What else should it be when you get together?”

“This time,” I said, “it’s not exactly philosophy, but something more like ethics.”

“What is the question?” asked Dennis.

Dennis was always ready for a discussion, and the more abstract the theme, the better he was pleased. He had been trained for the profession of medicine, but coming into possession of a fortune, had not found it necessary to practise, and had been devoting his time for some years past to Art and Metaphysics. I always enjoyed talking to him, though the position he had come to hold was one which I found it very difficult to understand, and I am not sure that I have been able to represent it fairly.

“We have been discussing,” I said, in answer to his question, “our judgments about what is good, and trying without much success to get over the difficulty, that whereas, on the one hand, we seem to be practically obliged to trust these judgments, on the other we find it hard to say which of them, if any, are true, and how far and in what sense.”

“Oh,” he replied, “then Bartlett ought really to be able to help you. At any rate he’s very positive himself about what’s good and what’s bad. Curiously enough, he and I have been touching upon the same point as you, and I find, among other things, that he is a convinced Utilitarian.”

“I never said so,” said Bartlett, “but I have no objection to the word. It savours of healthy homes and pure beer!”

“And is that your idea of Good?” asked Leslie, irritated, as I could see, by this obtrusion of the concrete.

“Yes,” he replied, “why not? It’s as good an idea as most.”

“I suppose,” I said, “all of us here should agree that the things you speak of are good. But somebody might very well deny it.”

“Of course somebody can deny anything, if only for the sake of argument.”

“You mean that no one could be serious in such a denial?”

“I mean that everybody really knows perfectly well what is good and what is bad; the difficulty is, not to know it, but to do it!”

“But surely you will admit that opinions do differ?”

“They don’t differ nearly so much as people pretend, on important points; or, if they do, the difference is not about what ought to be done, but about how to do it.”

“What ought to be done, then?” asked Leslie defiantly.

“Well, for example we ought to make our cities decent and healthy.”

“Why?”

“Because we ought; or, if you like, because it will make people happy.”

“But I don’t like at all! I don’t see that it’s necessarily good to make people happy.”

“Oh well, if you deny that

“Well, if I deny that?”

“I don’t believe you to be serious, that’s all. Good simply means, what makes people happy; and you must know that as well as I do.”

“You see!” interposed Dennis; “I told you he was a Utilitarian.”

“I daresay I am; at any rate, that’s what I think; and so, I believe, does everybody else.”

“‘The Universe,’” murmured Ellis, “’so far as sane conjecture can go, is an immeasurable swine’s trough, consisting of solid and liquid, and of other contrasts and kinds; especially consisting of attainable and unattainable, the latter in immensely greater quantities for most pigs.’”

“That’s very unfair,” Parry protested, “as an account of Hedonism.”

“I don’t see that it is at all,” cried Leslie.

“I think,” I said, “that it represents Bentham’s position well enough, though probably not Bartlett’s.”

“Oh well,” said Parry, “Bentham was only an egoistic Hedonist.”

“A what?” said Bartlett.

“An egoistic Hedonist.”

“And what may that be?”

“An egoistic Hedonist,” Parry was beginning, but Ellis cut him short. “It’s best explained,” he said, “by an example. Here, for example, is Bentham’s definition of the pleasures of friendship; they are, he says, ’those which accompany the persuasion of possessing the goodwill of such and such individuals, and the right of expecting from them, in consequence, spontaneous and gratuitous services.’”

We all laughed, though Parry, who loved fair play, could not help protesting. “You really can’t judge,” he said, “by a single example.”

“Can’t you?” cried Ellis; “well then, here’s another. ’The pleasures of piety’ are ’those which accompany the persuasion of acquiring or possessing the favour of God; and the power, in consequence, of expecting particular favours from him, either in this life or in another.’”

We laughed again; and Parry said, “Well, I resign myself to your levity. And after all, it doesn’t much matter, for no one now is an egoistic Hedonist.”

“What are we then,” asked Bartlett, “you and I?”

“Why, of course, altruistic Hedonists,” said Parry.

“And what’s the difference?”

“The difference is,” Parry began to explain, but Ellis interrupted him again.

“The difference is,” he cried, “that one is a brute and the other a prig.”

“Really, Ellis,” Parry began in a tone of remonstrance.

“But, Parry,” I interposed, “are you a Utilitarian?”

“Not precisely,” he replied; “but my conclusions are much the same as theirs. And of all the a priori systems I prefer Utilitarianism, because it is at least clear, simple, and precise.”

“That is what I can never see that it is.”

“Why, what is your difficulty?”

“In the first place,” I said, “the system appears to rest upon a dogma.”

“True,” he said, “but that particular dogma the greatest happiness of the greatest number is one which commends itself to everyone’s consciousness.”

“I don’t believe it!” said Ellis. “Let us take an example. A crossing-sweeper, we will suppose, is suffering from a certain disease about which the doctors know nothing. Their only chance of discovering how to cure it is to vivisect the patient; and it is found, by the hedonistic calculus, that if they do so, a general preponderance of pleasure over pain will result. Accordingly, they go to the crossing-sweeper and say,’O crossing-sweeper! In the name of the utilitarian philosophy we call upon you to submit to vivisection. The tortures you will have to endure, it is true, will be inconceivable: but think of the result! A general preponderance in the community at large of pleasure over pain! For every atom of pain inflicted on you, an atom of pleasure will accrue to somebody else. Upon you, it is true, will fall the whole of the pain; whereas the pleasure will be so minutely distributed among innumerable individuals that the increment in each case will be almost imperceptible. No matter, it will be there! and our arithmetic assures us that the total gain in pleasure will exceed the total loss in pain. It will also be distributed among a greater number of individuals. Thus all the requirements of the hedonistic calculus are satisfied! Your duty lies plain before you! Rise to the height of your destiny, and follow us to the dissecting room! What do you think the crossing-sweeper would say? I leave it to Bartlett to express his sentiments!”

“My dear Ellis,” said Parry, “your example is absurd. The case, to begin with, is one that could not possibly occur. And even if it did, one could not expect the man who was actually to suffer, to take an impartial view of the situation.”

“But,” I said, “putting the sufferer out of the question, what would really be the opinion of the people for whom he was to suffer? Do you think they would believe they ought to accept the sacrifice? Every man, I think, would repudiate it with horror for himself; and what right has he to accept it for other people?”

“On the utilitarian hypothesis,” said Parry, “he certainly ought to.”

“No doubt; but would he? Utilitarianism claims to rest upon common sense, but, in the case adduced, I venture to think common sense would repudiate it.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “but the example is misleading. It is a case, as I said, that could not occur a mere marginal case.”

“Still,” I said, “a marginal case may suggest a fundamental fallacy. Anyhow, I cannot see myself that the judgment that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is good has a more obvious and indisputable validity than any other judgments of worth. It seems to me to be just one judgment among others; and, like the others, it may be true or false. However, I will not press that point. But what I should like to insist upon is, that the doctrine which Bartlett seemed to hold

“I hold no doctrine,” interrupted Bartlett; “I merely expressed an opinion, which I am not likely to change for all the philosophy in the world.” And with that he opened the Chronicle, and presently becoming absorbed, paid for some time no further attention to the course of our debate.

“Well,” I continued, “the doctrine, whether Bartlett holds it or no, that the ultimately good thing is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, cannot be insisted upon as one which appeals at once to everyone’s consciousness as true, so that, in fact, since its enunciation, the controversy about Good may be regarded as closed. It will hardly be maintained, I imagine, even by Parry, that the truth of the doctrine is a direct and simple intuition, so that it has only to be stated to be accepted?”

“Certainly not,” Parry replied, “the contention of the Utilitarians is that everyone who has the capacity and will take the trouble to reflect will, in fact, arrive at their conclusions.”

“The conclusions being like other conclusions about what is good, the result of a difficult process of analysis, in which there are many possibilities of error, and no more self-evident and simple than any other judgment of the kind?”

He agreed.

“And further, the general principle, tentative and uncertain as it is, requiring itself to be perpetually interpreted anew for every fresh case that turns up.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why,” I said, “even if we grant that the end of action is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, yet we have still to discover wherein that happiness consists.”

“But,” he said, “happiness we define quite simply as pleasure.”

“Yes; but how do we define pleasure?”

“We don’t need to define it. Pleasure and pain are simply sensations. If I cut my finger, I feel pain; if I drink when I am thirsty, I feel pleasure. There can be no mistake about these feelings; they are simple and radical.”

“Undoubtedly. But if you limit pleasure and pain to such simple cases as these, you will never get out of them a system of Ethics. And, on the other hand, if you extend the terms indefinitely, they lose at once all their boasted precision, and become as difficult to interpret as Good and Evil.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why,” I said, “if all conduct turned on such simple choices as that between thick soup and clear, then perhaps its rules might be fairly summed up in the utilitarian formula. But in fact, as everyone knows, the choices are far more difficult; they are between, let us say, a bottle of port and a Beethoven symphony; leisure and liberty now, or L1000 a-year twenty years hence; art and fame at the cost of health, or sound nerves and obscurity; and so on, and so on through all the possible cases, infinitely more complex in reality than I could attempt to indicate here, all of which, no doubt, could be brought under your formula, but none of which the formula would help to solve.”

“Of course,” said Parry, “the hedonistic calculus is difficult to apply. No one, that I know of, denies that.”

“No one could very well deny it,” I replied. “But now, see what follows. Granting, for the moment, for the sake of argument, that in making these difficult choices we really do apply what you call the hedonistic calculus

“Which I, for my part, altogether deny!” cried Leslie.

“Well,” I resumed, “but granting it for the moment, yet the important point is not the criterion, but the result. It is a small thing to know in general terms (supposing even it were true that we do know it) that what we ought to seek is a preponderance of pleasure over pain; the whole problem is to discover, in innumerable detailed cases, wherein precisely the preponderance consists. But this can only be learnt, if at all, by long and difficult, and, it may be, painful experience. We do not really know, a priori, what things are pleasurable, in the extended sense which we must give to the word if the doctrine is to be at all plausible, any more definitely than we know what things are good. And the Utilitarians by substituting the word Pleasure for the word Good, even if the substitution were legitimate, have not really done much to help us in our choice.”

“But,” he objected, “we do at least know what Pleasure is, even if we do not know what things are pleasurable.”

“And so I might say we do know what Good is, even if we do not know what things are good.”

“But we know Pleasure by direct sensation.”

“And so I might say we know Good by direct perception.”

“But you cannot define Good.”

“Neither can you define Pleasure. Both must be recognised by direct experience.”

“But, at any rate,” he said, “there is this distinction, that in the case of Pleasure everyone does recognise it when it occurs; whereas there is no such general recognition of Good.”

“That,” I admitted, “may, perhaps, be true; I am not sure.”

“But,” broke in Leslie, “what does it matter whether it be true or no? What has all this to do with the question? It’s immaterial whether Pleasure or Good is the more easily and generally recognisable. The point is that they are radically different things.”

“No,” objected Parry, “our point is that they are the same thing.”

“But I don’t believe you really think so, or that anyone can.”

“And I don’t believe that anyone cannot!”

“Do you mean to say that you really agree with Bentham that, quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry?”

“Yes; at least I agree with what he means, though the particular example doesn’t appeal to me, for I hardly know what either pushpin or poetry is.”

“Well then, let us take Plato’s example. Do you think that, quantity of pleasure being equal, scratching oneself when one itches is as good as, say, pursuing scientific research.”

“Yes. But of course the point is that quantity of pleasure is not equal.”

“You mean,” interposed Ellis, “that there is more pleasure in scratching?”

“No, of course not.”

“But at least you will admit that there is more pleasure in some physical experiences? Plato, for example, takes the case of a catamite.”

“I admit nothing of the kind. In the first place, these gross physical pleasures do not last.”

“But suppose they did? Imagine an eternal, never-changing bliss of scratching, or of

“I don’t see the use of discussing the matter in this kind of way. It seems to me to deserve serious treatment”

“But I am perfectly serious. I do genuinely believe that a heaven of scratching, or at any rate of some analogous but intenser experience, would involve an indefinitely greater sum of pleasure than a heaven of scientific research.”

“Well, all I can say is, I don’t agree with you.”

“But why not?” cried Leslie. “If you were candid I believe you would. The fact is that you have predetermined that scientific research is a better thing than such physical pleasure, and then you bring out your calculation of pleasure so as to agree with that foregone conclusion. And that is what the Utilitarians always do. Being ordinary decent people they accept the same values as the rest of the world, and on the same grounds as the rest of the world. And then they pretend, and no doubt believe themselves, that they have been led to their conclusions by the hedonistic calculus. But really, if they made an impartial attempt to apply the calculus fairly, they would arrive at quite different results, results which would surprise and shock themselves, and destroy the whole plausibility of their theory.”

“That is your view of the matter.”

“But isn’t it yours?”

“No, certainly not.”

“At any rate,” I interposed, “it seems to be clear that this utilitarian doctrine has nothing absolute or final or self-evident about it. All we can say is that among the many opinions about what things are good, there is also this opinion, very widely held, that all pleasurable things are good, and that nothing is good that is not pleasurable. But that, like any other opinion, can be and is disputed. So that we return pretty much to the point we left, that there are a number of conflicting opinions about what things are good, that to these opinions some validity must be attached, but that it is difficult to see how we are to reconcile them or to choose between them. Only, somehow or other, as it seems to me, the truth about Good must be adumbrated in these opinions, and by interrogating the actual experience of men in their judgments about good things, we may perhaps be able to get at least some, shadowy notion of the object of our quest”

“And so,” said Ellis, getting up and stretching himself, “even by your own confession we end where we began.”

“Not quite,” I replied. “Besides, have we ended?”

For some minutes it seemed as though we had. The mid-day heat (it was now twelve o’clock) and the silence broken only by the murmur of the fountain (for the mowers opposite had gone home to their dinner) seemed to have induced a general disinclination to the effort of speech or thought Even Dennis whom I had never known to be tired in body or mind, and who was always debating something it seemed to matter very little what even he, I thought at first, was ready to let the discussion drop. But presently it became clear that he was only revolving my last words in his mind, for before long he turned to me and said:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘interrogating experience,’ or what results you hope to attain by that process.” At this Leslie pricked up his ears, and I saw that he at least was as eager as ever to pursue the subject further.

“Why,” continued Dennis, “should there not be a method of discovering Good independently of all experience?”

The phrase immediately arrested Wilson’s attention.

“‘A method independent of experience,’” he cried, “why, what kind of a method would that be?”

“It is not so easy to describe,” replied Dennis. “But I was thinking of the kind of method, for example, that is worked out by Hegel in his Logic?”

“I have never read Hegel,” said Wilson. “So that doesn’t convey much to my mind.”

“Well,” said Dennis, “I am afraid I can’t summarize him!”

“Can’t you?” cried Ellis, “I can! Here he is in a nutshell! Take any statement you like for example, ’Nothing exists!’ put it into the dialectical machine, turn the handle, and hey presto! out comes the Absolute! The thing’s infallible; it does not matter what you put in; you always get out the same identical sausage.”

Dennis laughed. “There, Wilson,” he said, “I hope you understand now!”

“I can’t say I do,” replied Wilson, “but I daresay it doesn’t much matter.”

“Perhaps, then,” said Ellis, “you would prefer the Kantian plan.”

“What is that?”

“Oh, it’s much simpler than the other. You go into your room, lock the door, and close the shutters, excluding all light Then you proceed to invert the mind, so as to relieve it of all its contents; look steadily into the empty vessel, as if it were a well; and at the bottom you will find Truth in the form of a categorical imperative. Or, if you don’t like that, there’s the method of Fichte. You take an Ego, by preference yourself; convert it into a proposition; negate it, affirm it, negate it again, and so on ad infinitum, until you get out the whole Universe in the likeness of yourself. But that’s rather a difficult method; probably you would prefer Spinoza’s. You take

“No!” cried Dennis, “there I protest! Spinoza is too venerable a name.”

“So are they all, all venerable names,” said Ellis. “But the question is, to which of them do you swear allegiance? For they all arrive at totally different results.”

“I don’t know that I swear allegiance to any of them,” he replied. “I merely ventured to suggest that it is only by some such method of pure reason that one can ever hope to discover Good.”

“You do not profess then,” I said, “to have discovered any such method yourself?”

“No.”

“Nor do you feel sure that anyone else has?”

“No.”

“You simply lie down and block the road?”

“Yes,” he said, “and you may walk over me if you can.”

“No,” I said, “It will be simpler, I think, if possible, to walk round you.” For by this time an idea had occurred to me.

“Do so,” he said, “by all means, if you can.”

“Well” I began, “let us suppose for the sake of argument that there really is some such method as you suggest of discovering Good a purely rational method, independent of all common experience.”

“Let us suppose it,” he said, “if you are willing.”

“Is it your idea then,” I continued, “that this Good so discovered, would be out of all relation to what we call goods? Or would it be merely the total reality of which they are imperfect and inadequate expressions?”

“I do not see,” he said, “why it should have any relationship to them. All the things we call good may really be bad; or some good and some bad in a quite chaotic fashion. There is no reason to suppose that our ideas about Good have any validity unless it were by an accidental coincidence.”

“And further,” I said, “though we really do believe there is a Good, and that there is a purely rational and a priori method of discovering it, yet we do not profess to have ascertained that method ourselves, nor do we feel sure that it has been ascertained by anyone? In any case, we admit, I suppose, that to the great mass of men, both of our own and all previous ages, such a method has remained unknown and unsuspected?”

He agreed.

“But these men, nevertheless, have been pursuing Goods under the impression that they were really good.”

“Yes.”

“And in this pursuit they have been expending, great men and small alike, or rather those whom we call great and small, all that store of energy, of passion, and blood and tears which makes up the drama of history?”

“Undoubtedly!”

“But that expenditure, as we now see, was futile and absurd. The purposes to which it was directed were not really good, nor had they any tendency to promote Good, unless it were in some particular case by some fortunate chance. Whatever men have striven to achieve, whether like Christ, to found a religion, or, like Cæsar, to found a polity, whether their quest were virtue or power or truth, or any other of the ends we are accustomed to value and praise, or whether they sought the direct opposites of these, or simply lived from hour to hour following without reflexion the impulse of the moment, in any and every case all alike, great and small, good and bad, leaders and followers, or however else we may class them, were, in fact, equally insignificant and absurd, the idle sport of illusions, one as empty and baseless as another. The history of nations, the lives of individual men, are stripped, in this view, of all interest and meaning; nowhere is there advance or retrogression, nowhere better or worse, nowhere sense or consistency at all. Systems, however imposing, structures, however vast, fly into dust and powder at a touch. The stars fall from the human firmament; the beacon-lights dance like will-o’-the-wisps; the whole universe of history opens, cracks, and dissolves in smoke; and we, from an ever-vanishing shore, gaze with impotent eyes at the last gleam on the wings of the dove of Reason as it dips for ever down to eternal night. Will not that be the only view we can take of the course of human action if we hold that what we believe to be goods have no relation to the true Good?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “I suppose it will.”

“And if we turn,” I continued, “from the past to the present and the future, we find ourselves, I think, in even worse case. For we shall all, those of us who may come to accept the hypothesis you put forward, be deprived of the consolation even of imagining a reason and purpose in our lives. The great men of the past, at any rate, could and did believe that they were helping to realize great Goods; but we, in so far as we are philosophers, shall have to forego even that satisfaction. We shall believe, indeed, that Good exists, and that there is a method of discovering it by pure reason; but this method, we may safely assume, we shall not most of us have ascertained. Or do you think we shall?”

“I cannot tell,” he said; “I do not profess to have ascertained it myself.”

“And meantime,” I said, “you have not even the right to assume that it is a good thing to endeavour to ascertain it. For the pursuit of Truth, it must be admitted, is one of the things which we call good; and these, we agreed, have not any relation to the true Good. Consider, then, the position of these unfortunate men who have learnt indeed that there is a Good, but who know nothing about it, except that it has nothing to do with what they call good. What kind of life will they live? Whatever they may put their hand to, they will at once be paralyzed by the thought that it cannot possibly be worth pursuing. Politics, art, pleasure, science of these and all other ends they know but one thing, that all is vanity. As by the touch of enchantment, their world is turned to dust. Like Tantalus they stretch lips and hands towards a water for ever vanishing, a fruit for ever withdrawn. At war with empty phantoms, they ’strike with their spirit’s knife,’ as Shelley has it, ‘invulnerable nothings,’ Dizzy and lost they move about in worlds not only unrealized, but unrealizable, ‘children crying in the night, with no language but a cry,’ and no father to cry to. And in all this blind confusion the only comfort vouchsafed is that somehow or other they may, they cannot tell how, discover a Good of which the only thing they know is that it has no connection with the Goods they have lost. Is not this a fair account of the condition to which men would be reduced who really did accept and believe your hypothesis?”

“Yes,” he said, “perhaps it is, but still I must protest against this appeal to prejudice and passion. Supposing the truth really were as I suggested, we should have to face it, whether or no it seemed to ruin our own life.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “supposing the truth were so. But, after all, we have no sufficient theoretical reason for believing it to be so, and every kind of practical reason against it. We cannot, it is true, demonstrate and that was admitted from the first that any of our judgments about what is good are true; but there is no reason why we should not believe and I should say we must believe that somehow or other they do at least have truth in them.”

“Well, and if so?”

“If so, we do not depend, as you said we do, or at least we do not believe ourselves to depend, for our knowledge about Good, upon some purely rational process not yet discovered; but those things which we judge to be good really, we think, in some sense or so, and by analyzing and classifying and comparing our experiences of such things we may come to see more clearly what it is in them that we judge to be good; and again by increasing experience we may come to know more Good than we knew; and generally, if we once admit that we have some light, we may hope, by degrees, to get more; and that getting of more light will be the most important business, not only of philosophy, but of life.”

“But if we can judge of Good at all, why do we not judge rightly? If we really have a perception, how is it that it is confused, not clear?”

“I cannot tell how or why; but perhaps it is something of this kind. Our experience, in the first place, is limited, and we cannot know Good except in so far as we experience it so, at least, I think, though perhaps you may not agree. And if that be so, even if our judgments about Good that we have experienced were clear, our conclusions drawn from them would yet be very imperfect and tentative, because there would be so much Good that we had not experienced. But, in fact, as it seems, our judgments even about what we do experience are confused, because every experience is indefinitely complex, and contains, along with the Good, so much that is indifferent or bad. And to analyze out precisely what it is that we are judging to be good is often a difficult and laborious task, though it is one that should be a main preoccupation with us all.”

“You think, then, that there are two reasons for the obscurity and confusion that prevail in our judgments about Good one, that our experience is limited, the other that it is complex?”

“Yes; and our position in this respect, as it always seems to me, is like that of people who are learning to see, or to develop some other sense. Something they really do perceive, but they find it hard to say what. Their knowledge of the object depends on the state of the organ; and it is only by the progressive perfecting of that, that they can settle their doubts and put an end to their disputes, whether with themselves or with other people.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, if you will allow me to elaborate my metaphor, I conceive that we have a kind of internal sense, like a rudimentary eye, whose nature it is to be sensitive to Good, just as it is the nature of the physical eye to be sensitive to light. But this eye of the soul, being, as I said, rudimentary, does not as yet perceive Good with any clearness or precision, but only in a faint imperfect way, catching now one aspect of it, now another, but never resting content in any of these, being driven on by the impulse to realize itself to ever surer and finer discrimination, with the sense that it is learning its own nature as it learns that of its object, and that it will never be itself a true and perfect organ until it is confronted with the true and perfect Good. And as by the physical eye we learn by degrees to distinguish colours and forms, to separate and combine them, and arrange them in definite groups, and then, going further, after discerning in this way a world of physical things, proceed to fashion for our delight a world of art, in that finer experience becoming aware of our own finer self; so, by this eye of hers, does the soul, by long and tentative effort, learn to distinguish and appraise the Goods which Nature presents to her; and then, still unsatisfied, proceed to shape for herself a new world, as it were, of moral art, fashioning the relations of man to Nature and to his fellow-man under the stress of her need to realize herself, ever creating and ever destroying only to create anew, learning in the process her own nature, yet aware that she has never learnt it, but passing on without rest to that unimagined consummation wherein the impulse that urges her on will be satisfied at last, and she will rest in the perfect enjoyment of that which she knows to be Good, because in it she has found not only her object but herself. Is not this a possible conception?”

“I do not say,” he replied, “that it is impossible; but I still feel a difficulty.”

“What is it?” I said, “for I am anxious not to shirk anything.”

“Well,” he said, “you will remember when Parry suggested that the perception of Good might perhaps be an instinct, you objected that instincts conflict one with another, and that we therefore require another faculty to choose between them. Now it seems to me that your own argument is open to the same objection. You postulate some faculty which perhaps you might as well call an instinct and this faculty, as I understand you, in the effort to realize itself, proceeds to discriminate various objects as good. But, now, does this same faculty also know that the Goods are good, and which is better than which, and generally in what relations they stand to one another and to the absolutely Good? Or do we not require here, too, another faculty to make these judgments, and must not this faculty, as I said at first, have previously achieved, by some method of its own, a knowledge of Good, in order that it may judge between Goods?”

“No,” I said, “in that way you will get, as you hint, nothing but an infinite regress. The perception of Good, whenever it comes, must be, in the last analysis, something direct, immediate, and self-evident; and so far I am in agreement with Parry. My only quarrel with him was in regard to his assumption that the judgments we make about Good are final and conclusive. The experiences we recognize as good are always, it seems to me, also bad; because we are never able to apprehend or experience what is absolutely Good. Only, as I like to believe you may say I have no grounds for the belief we are always progressing towards such a Good; and the more of it we apprehend and experience, the more we are aware of our own well-being; or perhaps I ought to say, of the well-being of that part of us, whatever it may be I call it the soul which pursues after Good. For her attitude, perhaps you will agree, towards her object, is not simply one of perception, but one of appetency and enjoyment. Her aim is not merely to know Good, but to experience it; so that along with her apprehension of Good goes her apprehension of her own well-being, dependent upon and varying with her relation to that, her object. Thus she is aware of a tension, as it were, when she cannot expand, of a drooping and inanition when nutriment fails, of a rush of health and vigour as she passes into a new and larger life, as she freely unfolds this or that aspect of her complex being, triumphs at last over an obstacle that has long hemmed and thwarted her course, and rests for a moment in free and joyous consciousness of self, like a stream newly escaped from a rocky gorge, to meander in the sun through a green melodious valley. And this perception she has of her own condition is like our perception of health and disease. We know when we are well, not by any process of ratiocination, by applying from without a standard of health deduced by pure thought, but simply by direct sensation of well-being. So it is with this soul of ours, which is conversant with Good. Her perception of Good is but the other side of her perception of her own well-being, for her well-being consists in her conformity to Good. Thus every phase of her growth (in so far as she grows) is in one sense good, and in another bad; good in so far as it is self-expression, bad in so far as the expression is incomplete. From the limitations of her being she flies, towards its expansion she struggles; and by her perception that every Good she attains is also bad, she is driven on in her quest of that ultimate Good which would be, if she could reach it, at once the complete realization of herself, and her complete conformity to Good.”

“But,” he objected, “apart from other difficulties, in your method of discovering the Good is there no place for Reason at all?”

“I would not say that,” I replied, “though I am bound to confess that I see no place for what you call pure Reason. It is the part of Reason, on my hypothesis, to tabulate and compare results. She does not determine directly what is good, but works, as in all the sciences, upon given data, recording the determinations not (in this case) of the outer but of the inner sense, noticing what kinds of activity satisfy, and to what degree, the expanding nature of this soul that seeks Good, and deducing therefrom, so far as may be, temporary rules of conduct based upon that unique and central experience which is the root and foundation of the whole. Temporary rules, I say, because, by the nature of the case, they can have in them nothing absolute and final, inasmuch as they are mere deductions from a process which is always developing and transforming itself. Systems of morals, maxims of conduct are so many landmarks left to show the route by which the soul is marching; casts, as it were, of her features at various stages of her growth, but never the final record of her perfect countenance. And that is why the current morality, the positive institutions and laws, on which Parry insisted with so much force, both have and have not the value he assigned to them. They are in truth invaluable records of experience, and he is rash who attacks them without understanding; and yet, in a sense, they are only to be understood in order to be superseded, because the experience they resume is not final, but partial and incomplete. Would you agree with that, Parry, or no?”

“I am not sure,” he said. “It would be a dangerous doctrine to put in practice.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I fear that life itself is a dangerous thing, and nothing we can do will make it safe. Our only hope is courage and sanity.”

“But,” said Dennis, “to return to the other point, on your view is our knowledge of Good altogether subsequent to experience?”

“Yes,” I replied, “our knowledge is, if you like; but it is a knowledge of experience in Good. We first recognize Good by what I call direct perception; then we analyze and define what we have recognized; and the results of this process, I suppose, is what we call knowledge, so far as it goes.”

“And there can be no knowledge of Good independent of experience?”

“I do not know; perhaps there might be; only I should like to suggest that even if we could arrive at such a knowledge by pure reason, we should have achieved only a definition of Good, not Good itself; for Good, I suppose you will agree, must be a state of experience, not a formula.”

“Even if it be so,” he said, “it might still be possible to arrive at its formula by pure reason.”

“It may be so,” I replied, “only I console myself with the thought, that if, as is the case with so many of us, we cannot see our way to any such method, we are not left, on my hypothesis, altogether forlorn. For though we cannot know Good, we can go on realizing Goods, and so making progress towards the ultimate Good, which is the goal not merely of knowledge but of action.”

“And how, may I ask,” said Wilson, after a pause, “in your conception, is Good related to Happiness?”

“That,” I replied, “is one of the points we have to ascertain by experience. For I regard the statement that happiness is the end as one of the numerous attempts which men have made to interpret the deliverances of their internal sense. I do not imagine the interpretation to be final and complete, and indeed it is too abstract and general to have very much meaning. But some meaning, no doubt, it has; and exactly what, may form the subject of much interesting discussion in detail, which belongs, however, rather to the question of the content of Good, than to that of the method of discovering it.”

“The method!” replied Wilson, “but have you really indicated a method at all?”

“I have indicated,” I replied “what I suppose to be the method of all science, namely, the interpretation of experience.”

“But,” he objected, “everything depends on the kind of interpretation.”

“True,” I admitted, “but long ago I did my best to prove that we could not learn anything about Good by the scientific method as you defined it. For that can tell us only about what is, not about what ought to be. At the same time, the recording and comparing and classifying of the deliverances of this internal sense, has a certain analogy to the procedure of science. At any rate, it might, I think, fairly be called a method, though a method difficult to apply, and one, above all, which only he can apply who has within himself the requisite experience. And in this respect the study of the Good resembles the study of the Beautiful.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why,” I said, “those who are conversant with the arts are well aware that there is such a thing as a true canon, though they do not profess to be in complete possession of it. They have a perception of the Beautiful, not ready-made and final, but tentative and in process of growth. This perception they cultivate by constant observation of beautiful works, some more and some less, according to their genius and opportunities; and thus they are always coming to see, though they never see perfectly, just as I said was the case in the matter of the Good.”

“But,” objected Parry, “what proof is there that there is any standard at all in such matters?”

“There is no proof,” I replied, “except the perception itself; and that is sufficient proof to those who have it. And to some slight extent, no doubt, all men have it; only many do not care to develop it; and so, feeling in themselves that they have no standard of judgment in art, they suppose that all others are like themselves; and that there really is no standard and no knowledge possible in such matters. And it is the same with Good; if a man will not choose to cultivate his inner sense, and to train it to clear and ever clearer perception, he will either never believe that there is any knowledge of Good, or any meaning at all in the word; or else, since all men feel the need of an end for action, he will have recourse to a fixed dogma, taken up by accident and clung to with obstinate desperation, without any root in his true inner nature; and to him all discussion about Good will seem to be mere folly, since he will believe either that he possesses it already or that it cannot be possessed at all. Or If he ask after the method of discovering it, he will be unable to understand it, because he does not choose to develop the necessary experience; and so he will go through life for ever unconvinced, arguing often and angrily, but always with no result, while all the time the knowledge he denies is lying hidden within him, if only he had the patience and faith to seek it there. But without that, there is no possibility of convincing him; and it will be wiser altogether to leave him alone. This, whether you call it a method or no, is the only idea I can form as to the possibility of discovering what is Beautiful and Good.”

There was silence for a few moments, and then Wilson said:

“Do you mean to imply, on your hypothesis, that we all are always seeking Good?”

“No,” I said; “whatever I may think on that point, I have not committed myself. It is enough for my purpose if we admit that we have the faculty of seeking Good, supposing we choose to do so.”

“And also the faculty of seeking Bad?”

“Possibly; I do not pronounce upon that.”

“Well, anyhow, do you admit the existence of Bad?”

“Oh yes,” I cried, “as much as you like; for it is bad, to my mind, that we should be in a difficult quest of Good, instead of in secure possession of it. And about the nature of that quest I make no facile assumption. I do not pretend that what I have called the growth of the soul from within is a smooth and easy process, a quiet unfolding of leafy green in a bright and windless air. If I recognize the delight of expansion, I recognize also the pain of repression the thwarted desire, the unfulfilled hope, the passion vain and abortive. I do not say even whether or no, in this dim travail of the spirit, pleasure prevails over pain, evil over good. The most I would claim is to have suggested a meaning for our life in terms of Good; and my view, I half hoped, would have appealed in particular to you, because what I have offered is not an abstract formula, hard to interpret, hard to relate to the actual facts of life, but an attempt to suggest the significance of those facts themselves, to supply a key to the cryptogram we call experience. And in proportion as we really believed this view to be true, it would lead us not away from but into life, not shutting us up, as has been too much the bent of philosophy, like the homunculus of Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ in the crystal phial of a set and rigid system, to ring our little chiming bell and flash our tiny light over the vast sea of experience, which all around us foams and floods, myriad-streaming, immense, and clearly seen, yet never felt, through that transparent barrier; but rather, like him when he broke the glass, made free of the illimitable main, to follow under the yellow moon the car of Galatea, her masque of nymphs and tritons, her gliding pomp of cymbals and conchs, away through tempest and calm, by night or day, companioned or alone, to the haunts of the far Cabeiri, and the home where the Mothers dwell.”

As I concluded, I looked across at Audubon, to see if I had made any impression upon him. But he only smiled at me rather ironically and said, “Is that meant, may I ask, for an account of everyday experience?”

“Rather,” I replied, “for an interpretation of it.”

“It would need a great deal of interpretation,” he said, “to make anything of the kind out of mine.”

“No doubt,” I said; “yet I am not without hope that the interpretation may be true; and that some day you may recognize it to be so yourself. Meantime, perhaps, I, who look on, see more of the game than you who play it; and surely in moments of leisure like this you will not refuse to listen to my poor attempt to read the riddle of the sphinx.”

“Oh,” he said, “I listen gladly enough, but as I would to a poem.”

“And do you think,” I replied, “that there is not more truth in poetry than in philosophy or science?”

But Wilson entered a vigorous protest, and for a time there was a babel of argument and declamation, from which no clear line of thought disengaged itself. Dennis, however, in his persistent way, had been revolving in his mind what I had said, and at the first opportunity he turned to me with the remark, “There’s one point in your position that I can’t understand. Do you mean to say that it is our seeking that determines the Good, or the Good that determines our seeking.”

“Really,” I said, “I don’t know. I should say both are true. We, in the process of our seeking, affirm what we find to be good, and in that sense determine for ourselves what for us was previously indeterminate; but, on the other hand, our determination is not mere caprice; it is determination of Good, which we must therefore suppose somehow or other to ‘be’ before we discern it.”

“But then, in what sense is it?”

“That is what it is so hard to say. Perhaps it is the law of our seeking, the creative and urging principle of the world, striving through us to realize itself, and recognized by us in that effort and strain.”

“Then your hypothesis is that Good has to be brought about, even while you admit that in some sense it is?”

“Yes, it exists partially, and it ought to come to exist completely.”

“Well now, that is exactly what seems to me absurd. If Good is at all it is eternal and complete.”

“But then, I ask in my turn, in what sense is it?”

“In the only sense that anything really is. The rest is nothing but appearance.”

“What we call Evil, you mean, is nothing but appearance.”

“Yes.”

“You think, in fact, with the poet, that ’all that is, is good’?”

“Yes,” he replied, “all that really is.”

“Ah!” I said, “but in that ‘really’ lies the crux of the matter. Take, for instance, a simple fact of our own experience pain. Would you say, perhaps, that pain is good?”

“No,” he replied, “not as it appears to us; but as it really is.”

“As it really is to whom, or in whom?”

“To the Absolute, we will say; to God, if you like.”

“Well, but what is the relation of the pain as it is in God to the pain that appears to us?”

“I don’t pretend to know,” he said, “but that is hardly the point. The point is, that it is only in connection with what is in God that the word Good has any real meaning. Appearance is neither good nor bad; it is simply not real.”

“But,” cried Audubon, interrupting in a kind of passion, “It is in appearance that we live and move and have our being. What is the use of saying that appearance is neither good nor bad, when we are feeling it as the one or the other every moment of our lives? And as to the Good that is in God, who knows or cares about it? What consolation is it to me when I am suffering from the toothache, to be told that God is enjoying the pain that tortures me? It is simply absurd to call God’s Good good at all, unless it has some kind of relation to our Good.”

“Well,” said Dennis, “as to that, I can only say that, in my opinion, it is nothing but our weakness that leads us to take such a view. When I am really at my best, when my intellect and imagination are working freely, and the humours and passions of the flesh are laid to rest, I seem to see, with a kind of direct intuition, that the world, just as it is, is good, and that it is only the confusion and obscurity due to imperfect vision that makes us call it defective and wish to alter it for the better. When I perceive Truth at all, I perceive that it is also Good; and I cannot then distinguish between what is, and what ought to be.”

“Really,” cried Audubon, “really? Well, that I cannot understand.”

“I hardly know how to make it clear,” he replied, “unless it were by a concrete example. I find that when I think out any particular aspect of things, so far, that is to say, as I can think it out at all, all the parts and details fall into such perfect order and arrangement that it becomes impossible for me any longer to desire that anything should be other than it is. And that, even in the regions where at other times I am most prone to discover error and defect. You know, for instance, that I am something of an economist?”

“What are you not?” I said. “If you sin, it is not from lack of light!”

“Well,” he continued, “there is, I suppose, no department of affairs which one is more inclined to criticise than this. And yet the more one investigates the more one discovers, even here, the harmony and necessity that pervade the whole universe. The ebb and flow of business from this trade or country to that, the rise and fall of wages, or of the rate of interest, the pouring of capital into or out of one industry or another, the varying relations of imports to exports, the periods of depression and recovery, and in close connection with all this the ever-changing conditions of the lives of countless workmen throughout the world, their well-being or ill-being, it may be their very life and death, together with the whole fate of future generations in health, capacity, opportunity, and the like, all this complexus of things, so chaotic and unintelligible at the first view, so full, as we say, of iniquity, injustice, and the like, falls, as we penetrate further, into one vast and harmonious system, so inspiring to the imagination, so inevitable to the understanding, that our objections and cavillings, ethical, aesthetic, or what you will, simply vanish away at the clearer vision, or, if they persist, persist as mere irrelevant illusions; while we abandon ourselves to the contemplation of the whole, as of some world-symphony, whose dissonances, no less than its concords, are taken up and resolved in the irresistible march and progress, the ocean-flooding of the Whole. You will think,” he continued, “that I am absurdly rhapsodical over what, after all, is matter prosaic enough; but what I wanted to suggest was that it is Reality so conceived that appeals to me at once as Truth and as Good. This partial vision of mine in the economic sphere is a kind of type of the way in which I conceive the Absolute. I conceive Him to be a Being necessary and therefore perfect; a Being in face of whom our own incoherent and tentative criticisms, our complaints that this or that should, if only it could, be otherwise, our regrets, desires, aspirations, and the like, shew but as so many testimonies to our own essential imperfection, weaknesses to be surmounted, rather than signs of worth to stamp us, as we vainly boast, the elect of creation.”

He finished; and I half expected that Leslie would intervene, since I saw, as I thought, many weak points in the position. But he kept silence, impressed, perhaps, by that idea of the Perfect and Eternal which has a natural home in the minds of the generous and the young. So I began myself rather tentatively:

“I think,” I said, “I understand the position you wish to indicate; and so stated, in general terms, no doubt it is attractive. It is when we endeavour to work it out in detail that the difficulties appear. The position, as I understand it, is, that, from the point of view of the Absolute, what we call Evil and what we call Good simply have no existence. Good and Evil, in our sense, are mere appearances; and Good, in the absolute sense, is identical with the Absolute or with God?”

“Yes,” he said, “that is my notion.”

“And so, for example, to apply the idea in detail, in the region which you yourself selected, all that we regret, or hate, or fear in our social system poverty, disease, starvation and the rest is not really evil at all, does not in fact exist, but is merely what appears to us? There is, in fact, no social evil?”

“No,” he replied, “in the sense I have explained there is none.”

“Well then,” I continued, “how is it with all our social and other ideals? Our desire to make our own lives and other people’s lives happier? Our efforts to subdue nature, to conquer disease, to introduce order and harmony where there appears to be discord and confusion? How is it with those finer and less directly practical impulses by which you yourself are mainly pre-occupied the quest of knowledge or of beauty for their own sake, the mere putting of ourselves into right relations with the universe, apart from any attempt to modify it? Are all these desires and activities mere illusions of ours, or worse than illusions, errors and even vices, impious misapprehensions of the absolutely Good, frivolous attempts to adapt the Perfect to our own imperfections?”

“No,” he replied, “I would not put it so. Some meaning, I apprehend, there must be in time and change, and some meaning also in our efforts, though not, I believe, the meaning which we imagine. The divine life, as I conceive it, is a process; only a process that is somehow eternal, circular, so to speak, not rectilinear, much as Milton appears to imagine it when he describes the blessed spirits ‘progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity’; and of this eternal process our activity, which we suppose to be moving towards an end, is somehow or other an essential element. So that, in this way, it is necessary and right that we should strive after ideals; only, when we are thinking philosophically, we ought to make clear to ourselves that in truth the Ideal is eternally fulfilled, its fulfilment consisting precisely In that process which we are apt to regard as a mere means to its realization. This, as Hegel has it, is the ‘cunning’ of the Absolute Reason, which deludes us into the belief that there is a purpose to be attained, and by the help of that delusion preserves that energy of action which all the time is really itself the End.”

I looked up at him as he finished, to see whether he was quite serious; and as he appeared to be so, and as Leslie still kept silence, I took up the argument as follows.

“I understand,” I said, “in a sort of way what you mean; but still the same difficulty recurs which Audubon has already put forward. On your hypothesis there seems to be an impassable gulf between God’s conception of Good and ours. To God, as it seems, the world is eternally good; and in its goodness is included that illusion by which it appears to us so bad, that we are continually employed in trying to make it better. The maintenance of this illusion is essential to the nature of the world; to us, evil always must appear. But, as we know by experience, the evil that appears is just as terrible and just as hateful as it would be if it really were. A toothache, as Audubon put it, is no less a pain to us because it is a pleasure to God. We cannot, if we would, adopt His point of view; and clearly it would be impious to try, since we should be endeavouring to defeat His ingenious plan to keep the world going by hoodwinking us. We therefore are chained and bound to the whirling wheel of appearance; to us what seems good is good, and what seems bad, bad; and your contention that all existence is somehow eternally good is for us simply irrelevant; it belongs to the point of view of God to which we have no access.”

“Yes,” cried Audubon, “and what a God to call God at all! Why not just as much the devil? What are we to think of the Being who is responsible for a world of whose economy our evil is not merely an accident, a mistake, but positively an essential, inseparable condition!”

“What, indeed!” exclaimed Leslie. “Call Him God, by all means, if you like, but such a God as Zeus was to Prometheus, omnipotent, indeed, and able to exact with infallible precision His daily and hourly toll of blood and tears, but powerless at least to chain the mind He has created free, or to exact allegiance and homage from spirits greater, though weaker, than Himself.”

This was the sort of talk, I knew, that rather annoyed Dennis. I did not therefore, for the moment, leave him time to reply, but proceeded to a somewhat different point:

“Even putting aside,” I said, “the moral character of God, as it appears in your scheme of the universe, must we not perhaps accuse Him of a slight lapse of intelligence? For, as I understand the matter, it was essential to the success of the Absolute’s plan that we should never discover the deception that is being played upon us. But, it seems, we do discover it. Hegel, for example, by your own confession, has not only detected but exposed it. Well then, what is to be done? Do you suppose that we could, even if we would, continue to lend ourselves to the imposition? Must not our aims and purposes cease to have any interest for us, once we are clear that they are not true ends? And that which, according to the hypothesis, is the true end, the ‘dateless and irrevoluble circle’ of activity, that, surely, we at least cannot sanction or approve, seeing that it involves and perpetuates the very misery and pain whose destruction was our only motive for acting at all. For, whatever may be the case with God, we, you will surely admit, are forbidden by all that in us is highest and best, to approve or even to acquiesce in the deliberate perpetuation of a world of whose existence all that we call evil is an essential and eternal constituent So that, as I said at first, it looks as if the Absolute Reason had not been, after all, quite as cunning as it thought, since it has allowed us to discover and expose the very imposition it had invented to cheat us into concurrence with its plans.”

Dennis laughed a little at this; and then, “Well,” he began, “between you, with your genial irony, and Audubon and Leslie with their heaven-defying rhetoric, I scarcely know whether I stand on my head or my heels. But, the fact is, I think I made a slip in stating my view; or perhaps there was really a latent contradiction in my mind. At any rate, what I believe, whether or no I can believe it consistently, is that it is possible for us, so to speak, to take God’s point of view; so that the evil against which we rebel we may come at last to acquiesce in, as seen from the higher point of view. And, seriously, don’t you think it is conceivable that that may be, after all, the true meaning of the discipline of life?”

“I cannot tell,” I said, “perhaps it may. But, meantime, allow me to press home the importance of your admission. For, as you say, there is at least one of our aims which has a real significance, namely, that of reaching the point of view of God. But this is something that lies in the future, something to be brought about. And so, on your own hypothesis, Good, after all, would not be that which eternally exists, but something which has to be realized in time namely, a change of mind on the part of all rational beings, whereby they view the world no longer in a partial imperfect way, but, in Spinoza’s phrase, ’sub specie aeternitatis’”

“No,” he said, “I cannot admit that that is an end for the Absolute, though I admit it is an end for us. The Absolute, somehow or other, is eternally perfect and good; and this eternal perfection and goodness are unaffected by any change that may take place in our minds.”

“Well,” I said, “I must leave it to the Absolute and yourself to settle how that can possibly be. Meantime, I am content with your admission that, for us, at least, there is an end and a Good lying before us to be realized in the future. For that, as I understand, you do admit. In your own life, for example, even if you aim at nothing else, or at nothing else which you wholly approve, yet you do aim, at least, with your whole nature at this to attain a view of the world as it may be conceived in its essence to be, not merely as it appears to us.”

“Yes,” he said, “I admit that is my aim.”

“That aim, then, is your Good?”

“I suppose so.”

“And it is something, as I said, that lies in the future? For you do not, I suppose, count yourself to have attained, or at least to have attained as perfectly as you hope to?”

He agreed again.

“Well then,” I continued, “what may be the relation of this Good of yours, awaiting realization in the future, to that eternal Good of God in which you also believe, we will reserve, with your permission, for some future inquiry. It is enough for our present purpose that even you, who assert the eternal perfection of the world, do nevertheless at the same time admit a future Good; and much more do other men admit it, who have no idea that the world is perfect at all. So that we may, I think, safely suppose it to be generally agreed that the Good is something to be realized in the future, so far, at any rate as it concerns us and, for my part, I have no desire to go farther than that.”

“Well,” he said, “I am content for the present to leave the matter so. But I reserve the right to go back upon the argument.”

“Of course!” I replied, “for it is not, I hope, an argument, but a discussion; and a discussion not for victory but for truth. Meantime, then, let us take as a hypothesis that Good is something to be brought about; and let us consider next the other point that Is included in your position. According to you, as I understand, what requires to be brought about, if ever Good is to be realized, is not any change in the actual stuff, so to speak, of the world, in the structure, as it were, of our experience, but only a change in our attitude towards all this a change in the subject, as they say, and not in the object. Our aim should be not to abolish what we call evil, by successive modifications of physical and social conditions, but rather, all these remaining essentially the same, to come to see that what appears to be evil is not really so.”

“Yes,” he said, “that is the view I would suggest.”

“So that, for example, though we might still experience a toothache, we should no longer regard it as an evil; and so with all the host of things we are in the habit of calling bad: they would continue unchanged ‘in themselves,’ as you Hegelians say, only to us they would appear no longer bad, but good?”

“Yes; as I said at first, all reality is good, and all Evil, so-called, is merely illusion.”

I was about to reply when I was forestalled by Bartlett. For some time past the discussion had been left pretty much to Dennis and myself, with an occasional incursion from Audubon and Leslie. Ellis had gone indoors; Parry and Wilson were talking together about something else; and Bartlett appeared to be still absorbed in the Chronicle. I noticed, however, that for the last few moments he had been getting restless, and I suspected that he was listening, behind his newspaper, to what we were saying. I was not therefore altogether surprised when, upon Dennis’ last remark, he suddenly broke into our debate with the exclamation;

“Would it be’ in order’ to introduce a concrete example? There is a curiously apt one here in the Chronicle.”

And upon our assenting, he read us a long extract about phosphorus-poisoning, the details of which I now forget, but at any rate it brought before us, very vividly, a tale of cruel suffering and oppression.

“Now,” he said, as he finished, “is that, may I ask, the kind of thing that it amuses you to call mere illusion?”

“Yes,” replied Dennis stoutly, “that will do very well for an example.”

“Well,” he rejoined, “I do not propose to dispute about words; but for my own part I should have thought that, if anything is real, that is; and so, I think, you would find it, if you yourself were the sufferer.”

“But,” objected Dennis, “do you think that it is in the moment of suffering that one is most competent to judge about the reality of pain?”

“Certainly, for it is only in the moment of suffering that one really knows what it is that one is judging about.”

“I am not sure about that. I doubt whether it is true that experience involves knowledge and vice versa. It is, indeed, to my mind, part of the irony of life, that we know so much which we can never experience, and experience so much which we can never know.”

“I don’t follow that,” said Bartlett, “but of one thing I am sure, that you will never get rid of evil by calling it illusion.”

“No,” Dennis conceded, “you will never of course get rid of it, in the sense you mean, by that, or indeed, in my opinion, by any other means. But we were discussing not what we are to do with evil, but how we are to conceive it.”

“But,” he objected, “if you begin by conceiving it as illusion, you will never do anything with it at all.”

“Perhaps not, but I am not sure that that is my business.”

“At any rate, Dennis,” I interposed, “you will, I expect, admit, that for us, while we live in the region of what you call ‘Appearance,’ Evil is at least as pressing and as obvious as Good.”

“Yes,” he said, “I am ready to admit that.”

“And,” I continued, “for my part I agree with Bartlett and with Leslie, that it is Appearance with which we are concerned. What I have been contending for throughout, is that in the world in which we live (whether we are to call it Reality or Appearance), Evil and Good are the really dominating facts; and that we cannot dismiss them from our consideration either on the ground that we know nothing of them (as Ellis was inclined to maintain) or on the ground that we know all about them (as Parry and Wilson seemed to think). On the contrary, it is, I believe, our main business to find out about them; and that we can find out about them is with me an article of faith, and so, I believe, it is with most people, whether or no they are aware of it or are ready to admit it.”

Dennis was preparing to reply, when Ellis reappeared to summon us to lunch. We followed him in gladly enough, for it was past our usual hour and we were hungry; and the conversation naturally taking a lighter turn, I have nothing further to record until we reassembled in the afternoon.