When we reassembled for coffee on the loggia after lunch, I did not suppose we should continue the morning’s discussion. The conversation had been turning mostly on climbing, and other such topics, and finally had died away into a long silence, which, for my own part, I felt no particular inclination to break. We had let down an awning to shelter us from the sun, where it began to shine in upon us, so that it was still cool and pleasant where we sat; and so delightful did I feel the situation to be, that I was almost vexed to be challenged to renew our interrupted debate. The challenge, rather to my surprise, came from Audubon, who suddenly said to me, a propos of nothing, in a tone at once ironic and genial:

“Well, I thought you talked very well this morning.”

“Really!” I rejoined, “I imagined you were thinking it all great nonsense.”

“So no doubt it was,” he replied; “still, it amused me to hear you.”

“I am glad of that, at any rate; I was afraid perhaps you were bored.”

“Not at all. Of course, I couldn’t fail to see that you weren’t arriving anywhere. But that I never expected. In fact, what amuses me most about you is, the way in which you continue to hope that you’re going to get at some result.”

“But didn’t we?”

“I don’t see that you did. You showed, or tried to show, that we must believe in Good; but you made no attempt to discover what Good is.”

“No,” I admitted; “that, of course, is much more difficult.”

“Exactly; but it is the only point of importance.”

“Well,” I said, “perhaps if we were to try, we should find that we can come to some agreement even about that.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“But why not?”

“Because people are so radically different, that there is no common ground to build upon.”

“But is the difference really so radical as all that?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think so. At any rate, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I make you an offer. Here are eight of us, all Englishmen, all contemporaries, all brought up more or less in the same way. And I venture to say that, if you will raise the question, you won’t find, even among ourselves, with all the chances in your favour, any substantial agreement about what we think good.”

This direct challenge was rather alarming. I didn’t feel that I could refuse to take it up, but I was anxious to guard myself against the consequences of failure. So I began, with some hesitation, “You must remember that I have never maintained that at any given moment any given set of people will be found to be in agreement on all points. All I ventured to suggest was, that instead of our all being made, as you contend, radically different, we have, underneath our differences, a common nature, capable of judging, and judging truly, about Good, though only on the basis of actual experience of Good. And on this view I shall, of course, expect to find differences of opinion, corresponding to differences of experience, even among people as much alike as ourselves; only I shall not expect the differences to be finally irreconcilable, but that we shall be able to supplement and elucidate one another’s conclusions by bringing to bear each his own experience upon that of the rest.”

“Well,” he said, “we shall see. I have invited you to make the experiment.”

“I am willing,” I replied, “if it is agreeable to the others. Only I must ask you to understand from the beginning precisely what it is I am trying to do. I shall be merely describing to you what I have been able to perceive, with such experience as I have had, in this difficult matter; and you will judge, all of you, whether or no, and to what extent, your perceptions coincide with mine, the object being simply to clear up these perceptions of ours, if we can; to define somehow, as it were, what we have seen, in the hope of coming to see something more.”

They agreed to take me on my own terms, and I was about to begin, when, happening to catch Dennis’ eye, I suddenly felt discouraged. “After all,” I said, “I doubt whether it’s much use my making the attempt.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said. “At least well, I may as well confess it, though it seems like giving away my whole case. The fact is, that there are certain quite fundamental points in this connection on which Dennis and I have never been able to agree; and although I believe we should in time come to understand one another, I doubt whether we can do so here and now. At any rate, he doesn’t look at all as if he meant to make it easy for me; and if I cannot carry him along with me, I suppose I may as well give up at once.”

“Oh,” said Audubon, “if that is all, I will make a concession. We will leave Dennis out of the reckoning. It shall be enough if you can persuade the rest of us.”

“But,” I urged, “I doubt, even so, whether Dennis will ever allow me to get to the end. You see, he never lets things pass if he doesn’t happen to agree.”

“Oh,” cried Ellis, “it’s all right. We will keep him in order.”

Dennis laughed. “You’re disposing of me,” he said, “in a very easy manner. But perhaps I had better go away altogether; for, if I stay, I certainly cannot pledge myself not to interrupt.”

“No,” I said, “that seems hardly fair. What I propose is, that we should both try to be as conciliatory as we can. And then, by the process of ‘give and take,’ I shall perhaps slip past you without any really scandalous concession on either side.”

“Well,” he said, “you can try.”

So, after casting about in my mind, I began, with some hesitation, as follows:

“The first thing, then, that I want to say is this: Good, as it seems to me, necessarily involves some form of conscious activity.”

As I had expected, Dennis interrupted me at once.

“I don’t see that at all,” he said. “Consciousness may have nothing to do with it.”

“Perhaps, indeed, it may not,” I replied, with all the suavity I could command. “I should rather have said that I, as a matter of fact, can form no idea of Good except in connection with consciousness.”

“Can you not?” he exclaimed, “but I can! If a thing is good it’s good, so it appears to me, whether or no there is any consciousness of it.”

“But,” I said, “I, you see, myself, have no experience of anything existing apart from consciousness, so it is difficult for me to know whether such a thing would be good or no. But you, perhaps, are differently constituted.”

“Not in that point,” he replied. “I admit, of course, that there is no experience without consciousness. But we can surely conceive that of which we have no experience? And I should have thought it was clear that Good, like Truth, is, whether or no anyone is aware of it. Or would you say that 2 + 2 = 4 is only true when someone is thinking of it?”

“As to that,” I replied, “I would rather not say anything about it just now. On the logical point you may be right; but that, I think, need not at present detain us, because what I am trying to get at, for the moment, is something rather different. I will put it like this: Good, if it is to be conceived as an object of human action, must be conceived, must it not, as an object of consciousness? For otherwise do you think we should trouble to pursue it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “whether we should; but perhaps we ought to.”

“But,” I urged, “do you really think we ought? Do you think, to take an example, that it could be a possible or a right aim for an artist, say, to be perpetually producing, in a state of complete unconsciousness, works which on completion should be immediately hermetically sealed and buried for all eternity at the bottom of the sea? Do you think that he could or ought to consider such production as a Good? And so with all the works of man. Do we, and really ought we to, do anything except with some reference to consciousness?”

“I don’t know whether we do,” he replied, “but I think it quite possible that we ought.”

“Well,” I said, “we shall not, I suppose, just now, come to a closer agreement But is there anyone else who shares your view? for, if not, I will, with your permission, go on to the next point”

None spoke, and Dennis made no further opposition. So, after a pause, I proceeded as follows: “I shall assume, then, that Good, in the sense in which I am conceiving it, as an end of human action, involves some kind of conscious activity. And the next question would seem to be, activity of whom?”

“That, at any rate,” said Leslie, “appears to be simple enough. It must be an activity of some person or persons.”

“Once more,” murmured Dennis, “I protest.”

But this time I ventured to ignore him, and merely said, in answer to Leslie, “The question, then, will be, what persons?”

“Why,” he replied, “ourselves, I suppose!”

“What do you say, Parry?” I asked.

“I don’t quite understand,” he replied, “the kind of way you put your questions. But my own idea has always been, what I suppose is most people’s now, that the Good we are working for is that of some future generation.”

At this Leslie made some inarticulate interjection, which I thought it better to ignore. And, answering Parry, I said, “Suppose, then, we were to make a beginning by examining your hypothesis.”

“By all means,” he said, “though I should have thought we should all have accepted it unless, perhaps, it were Dennis.”

“I most certainly don’t!” cried Leslie.

“Nor I,” added Audubon.

“Oh you!” cried Parry, “you accept nothing!”

“True”; he replied, “my motto is ‘j’attends.’”

“Well,” I resumed, “let us follow the argument and see where it leads us. The hypothesis is, that Good involves some state of activity of some generation indefinitely remote. Is not that so, Parry?”

“Yes,” he said, “and one can more or less define what the state of activity, as you call it, will be.”

“Of course,” interposed Ellis, “it will be one of heterogeneous, co-ordinate, coherent

“That,” I interrupted, “is not at present the question. The question is merely as to the location of Good. According to Parry, it is located in this particular remote generation, and, I suppose, in those that follow it. But now, what about all the other generations, from the beginning of the world onward? Good, it would seem, can have no meaning for them, since it is the special privilege of those who come after them.”

“Oh, yes, it has!” he replied, “for it is their business to bring it about, not indeed for themselves, but for their successors.”

“But,” cried Leslie, “what an absurd idea! Countless myriads of men and women are born upon the earth, live through their complex lives of action and suffering, pleasure and pain, hopes, fears, satisfactions, aspirations, and the like, pursuing what they call Good, and avoiding what they call Bad, under the naif impression that there is Good and Bad for them and yet the significance of all this is not really for themselves at all, but for some quite other people who will have the luck to be born in the remote future, and for whose sake alone their fellow-creatures, from the very beginning of time, have been brought into being like so many lifeless tools, to be used up and laid aside, when done with, on the black infinite ash-heap of the dead.”

“Oh, come!” said Parry, “you exaggerate! These tools, as you call them, have a good enough time. It does not follow, because the final Good lies in the future, that the present has no Good at all. It has just as much Good as people can get out of it.”

“But then,” said Leslie, “in that case it is this Good of their own with which each generation is really concerned. So far as they do get Good at all they get it as an activity in themselves.”

“Certainly,” said Ellis; “and for my own part, I am sick of that cant of living for future generations. Let us, at least, live for ourselves, whether we live well or badly.”

“Well,” replied Parry, rather stiffly, “of course every one has his own ideas. But I confess that, for my own part, the men I admire are those who have sacrificed themselves for the future.”

“But, Parry,” I interposed, “let us get clear about this; and with a view to clearness let us take our own case. We, as I understand you, have to keep in view a double Good: first, a Good for ourselves, which is not indeed the perfect Good (for that is reserved for a future generation), but still is something Good as far as it goes whether it be a certain degree of happiness, or however else we may have to define it; and as to this Good, there appears to be no difficulty, for we who pursue it are also the people who get it That is so, is it not?”

He agreed.

“But now,” I continued, “we come to the point of dispute. For besides this Good of our own, we have also, according to the theory, to consider a Good in which we have no share, that of those who are to be born in some indefinite future. And to this remote and alien Good we have even, on occasion, to sacrifice our own.”

“Certainly,” he said, “all good citizens will think so.”

“I believe,” I admitted, “that they will. And yet, how strange it seems! For consider it in this way. Imagine that the successive generations can somehow be viewed as contemporaneous being projected, as it were, from the plane of time into that of space.”

“It’s rather hard,” he said, “to imagine that.”

“Well, but try, for the sake of argument; and consider what we shall have. We shall have a society divided into two classes, composed, the one of all the generations who, if they followed one another in time, would precede the first millenarian one; the other of all the millenarian-generations themselves. And of these two classes the first would be perpetually engaged in working for the second, sacrificing to it, if need be, on occasion, all its own Good, but without any hope or prospect of ever entering itself into that other Good which is the monopoly of the other class, but to the production of which its own efforts are directed. What should we say of such a society? Should we not say that it was founded on injustice and inequality, and all those other phrases with which we are wont to denounce a system of serfdom or slavery?”

“But,” he objected, “your projection of time into space has falsified the whole situation. For in fact the millenarian generation would not come into being until the others had ceased to be; and therefore the latter would not be being sacrificed to it.”

“No,” I said, “but they would have been sacrificed; and surely it comes to the same thing?”

“I am not sure,” he replied, “and anyhow, I don’t think sacrifice is the right word. In a society every man’s interest is in the Whole; and when he works for the Whole he is also working for himself.”

“No doubt that is true,” I replied, “in a society properly constituted, but I question whether it would be true in such a society as I have described. And then there is a further difficulty and here, I confess, my projection of time into space really does falsify the issue; for in the succession of generations in time, where is the Whole? Each generation comes into being, passes, and disappears; but how, or in what, are they summed up?”

“Why,” he said, “in a sense they are all summed up in the last generation.”

“But in what sense? Do you mean that their consciousness somehow persists into it, so that they actually enjoy its Good?”

“Of course not,” he said, “but I mean that it was conditioned by them, and is the result of their labour and activities.”

“In that sense,” I replied, “you might say that the oysters I eat are summed up in me. But it would be a poor consolation to the oysters!”

“Well,” he rejoined, “whatever you may say, I still think it right that each generation should sacrifice itself (as you call it) for the next. And so, I believe, would you, when it came to the point. At any rate, I have often heard you inveigh against the shortsightedness of modern politicians, and their unwillingness to run great risks and undertake great labours for the future.”

“Quite true,” I said, “that is the view I take. But I was trying to see how the view could be justified. For it seems to me, I confess, that we can only be expected to labour for what is, in some sense or other, our own Good; and I do not see how the Good of future generations, in your way of putting it, is also ours.”

“But,” he said, “we have an instinct that it is.”

“I believe we have,” I replied, “but the question would be, what that instinct really means. Somehow or other, I think it must mean, as you yourself suggested, that our Good is the Good of the Whole. Only the difficulty is to see how there is a Whole at all.”

“Well,” he said, “perhaps there is no Whole. What then?”

“Why, then,” I replied, “how can we justify an instinct which bids us labour and sacrifice ourselves for a Good, which, on this hypothesis, has no significance for us, but only for other people.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “we cannot justify it, but I am sure we ought to obey it; and, indeed, I believe we cannot do otherwise. Even taking the view that the order of the world is altogether unjust, as I admit it would be on the view we are considering, yet, since we cannot remedy the injustice, we are bound at least to make the best of it; and the best we can do is to prepare the Good for those who come after us, even though we can never enter into it ourselves.”

“I am not so sure about that,” Ellis interrupted, “I think the best we can do is to try and realize Good for ourselves as much as we can get, even if we admit that this is but little. For we do at least know, or may hope to discover, what Good for ourselves is; whereas Good for other people is far more hypothetical.”

“But, surely,” he objected, “that would lead to action we cannot approve to a sacrifice of all larger Goods to our own pleasure of the moment. We should breed, for example, without any regard to the future efficacy of the race

“That,” interrupted Ellis, “we do as it is.”

“Yes, but we don’t justify it those of us, at least, who think. And, again, we should squander on immediate gratifications wealth which ought to be stored up against the future. And so on, and so on; it is not necessary to multiply examples.”

“But,” I objected, “we should only do these things if we thought that kind of short-sighted activity to be good; but, as a matter of fact, we do not, we who object to it. And that is because, as I hinted before, our idea of even our own Good is that of an activity in and for the Whole, and not merely in and for ourselves. And, whether it is reasonable or no, we cannot help extending the idea of the Whole, so as to include future generations. But, as it seems to me, the real meaning and justification of our action is not merely that we are seeking the Good of future generations but that we are endeavouring to realize our own Good, which consists in some such form of activity. So that really, as was suggested at the beginning, Good will be a kind of activity in ourselves, even though that activity be directed towards ends in which we do not expect to share.”

At this point, Dennis, who had been struggling to speak, broke in at last, in spite of Ellis’s efforts to restrain him.

“Why do you keep saying ’Our Good’?” he cried. “Why do you not say the Good? I can’t understand this talk of me and thee, our Good, and their Good, as if there were as many Goods as there are people.”

“Well,” I said, “the distinction, after all, was introduced by Parry, who said that we ought to aim at the Good of a future generation. Still, I admit that I was getting a little unhappy myself at the kind of language into which I was betrayed. But what I want to say is this: So far as it is true at all that it is good to labour for future generations, goodness consists in the activity of so labouring, as much, at least, as in the result produced in those for whose sake the labour is. That, at least, is the only way in which I can find the position reasonable at all.”

“I don’t see it,” said Parry, and was preparing to re-state his position, when Wilson suddenly intervened with a new train of thought.

“The fact is,” he said, “you have begun altogether at the wrong end.”

“I daresay,” I said, “I can’t find the end; it’s all such a coil.”

“Well,” he said, “this is where I believe the trouble came in. You started with the idea that the Good must be good for individuals; and that was sure to land you in confusion.”

“What then is your idea?” I asked.

“Why,” he said, “as you might expect from a biologist, I regard everything from the point of view of the species.”

At this I saw Ellis sit up and prepare for an encounter.

“Nature,” continued Wilson, “has always in view the Whole not the Part, the species not the individual. And this law, which is true of the whole creation, is thrown into special relief in the case of man, because there the interest of the species is embodied in a particular form the Society or the State and may be clearly envisaged, as a thing apart, towards the maintenance of which conscious efforts may be directed.”

“And this, which is the end of Nature, according to you, is also the Good?”

“Naturally.”

“Well,” I said, “I will not recapitulate here the objections I have already urged against the view that the course of Nature determines the content of the Good. For, quite apart from that, it is a view which many people hold and one which was held long before there was a science of biology that the community is the end, and the individual only the means.”

“But,” he said, “biology has given a new basis and a new colour to the view.”

“I don’t know about that,” cried Ellis, unable any longer to restrain himself, “but I am sure it has given us a new kind of language. In the old days, when Wilson’s opinion was represented by Plato, men were still men, and were spoken of as such, however much they might be subordinated to the community. But now! why, if you open one of these sociological books, mostly, I am bound to say, in German, ’Entwurf einer Sozial-anthropologie,’ ’Versuch einer anthropologischen Darstellung der menschlichen Gesellschaft vom Sozial-biologischen Standpunkt aus,’ and the like you will hardly be able to realize that you are dealing with human beings at all. I have seen an unmarried woman called a ‘female non-childbearing human.’ And at the worst, men actually cease to be even animals; they become mere numbers; they are calculated by the theory of combinations; they are masses, averages, classes, curves, anything but men! For every million of the population, it has been solemnly estimated, there will be one genius, one imbecile, 256,791 individuals just above the mean, 256,791 just below it! Observe, 256,791! Not, as one might have been tempted to believe, 256,790! What a saving grace in that odd unit! And this is the kind of thing that is revolutionizing history and politics! No more great men, no more heroic actions, no more inspirations, passions, and ideals! Nothing but calculations of the chances that A will meet and breed out of B! Nothing but analysis of the mechanism of survival! Nothing but

“My dear Ellis,” interrupted Wilson, “you appear to me to be digressing.”

“Digressing!” he cried “Would that I could digress out of this world altogether! Would that I could digress to a planet where they have no arithmetic! Where a man could be a man, not a figure in an addition sum, a unit in an average, an individual in a species

“Where,” exclaimed Audubon, taking him up, “a man could be himself, as I have often said, ‘imperial, plain, and true.’”

There was a chorus of protestation at the too familiar quotation; and for a time I was unable to lay hold of the broken thread of the argument. But at last I got a hearing for the question I was anxious to address to Wilson.

“You say,” I began, “that by Good we mean the Good of the community?”

“I say,” he replied, “that that is what we ought to mean.”

“But in what sense do you understand the word community?”

“In the sense of that organization of individuals which represents, so to speak, the species.”

“How represents?”

“In the sense that it is its function to maintain and perfect the species.”

“But is that the function of the community?”

“If it is not, it ought to be; and to a great extent it is. If you look at the social mechanism, not with the eyes of a mere historian, who usually sees nothing, but with those of a biologist and man of science, intent upon essentials, you will find that it is nothing but an elaborate apparatus of selection, natural or artificial, as you like to call it. First, there is the struggle of races, which may be traced not only in war and conquest, but more insidiously under the guise of peace, so that, for example, at this day you may witness throughout Europe the gradual extinction of the long-headed fair by the round-headed dark stock. Then there is the struggle of nation with nation, resulting in the gradual elimination of the weaker that, of course, is obvious enough; but what is not always so clearly seen is the not less certain fact, that within the limits of each society the same process is everywhere at work. To pass over the economic struggle for existence, of which we are perhaps sufficiently aware, what else is our system of examinations but a mechanism of selection, whereby it is determined that certain persons only shall have access to certain professions? What else is the convention whereby marriages are confined to people of the same class, thus securing the perpetuation of certain types, and especially of the better-gifted and better-disposed? Turn where we may we find the same phenomenon. Society is a machine for sifting out the various elements of the race, combining the like, disparting the unlike, bringing some to the top, others to the bottom, preserving these, eliminating those, indifferent to the fate, good or bad, of the individuals it controls, but envisaging always the well-being of the Whole.”

“But,” I objected, “is it so certain that it is well-being that is kept in view? Do you not recognize a process of deterioration as well as of improvement? You mentioned, for instance, that the long-headed fair race, is giving place to what I understand is regarded as an inferior type.”

“No doubt,” he admitted, “there are periods of decline. Still, on the whole, the movement is an upward one.”

“Well,” I replied, “that, after all, is not the question we are at present discussing. Your main point is, that when we speak of Good we mean, or should mean, the Good, not of the individual, but of the species. But what, I should like to know, is the species? Is it somehow an entity, or being, that it has a Good?”

“No,” he replied, “it is merely, of course, a general name for the individuals; only for all the individuals taken together, not one by one or in groups.”

“The Good of the species, then, is the Good of all the individuals taken together.”

“Yes.”

“But” I said, “how can that be? It is good for the species, according to you, that certain individuals should be eliminated, or should sink to the bottom, or whatever else their fate may be. But is that also good for the individual in question?”

“I don’t know about that,” he replied, “and I don’t see that it matters. I only say that it is good for the species.”

“But they are part of the species; so that if it is good for the species it is good for them.”

“No! for the Good of the species consists in the selection of the best individuals. It is indifferent to all the rest”

“Then by the Good of the species you mean the good of the selected individuals?”

“Not exactly; I mean it is good that those individuals should be selected.”

“But good for whom, if not for them? For the individuals who are eliminated? Or for you who look on? Or perhaps, for God?”

“God! No! I mean good, simply good.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” I said. “Does Good then hang, as it were, in the air, being Good for nobody at all?”

“Well, if you like, we will say it is good for Nature.”

“But is Nature, then, a conscious being?”

“I don’t say that”

“I am very sorry,” I said, “but really I cannot understand you. If you reject God, I see only two alternatives remaining. Either the Good you speak of is that of all the individuals of the species taken together, or it is that of the best individuals; and in either case I seem to see difficulties.”

“What difficulties?” asked Parry. For Wilson did not speak.

“Why,” I said, “taking the first alternative, I do not see how it can be good for the inferior individuals to be degraded or eliminated. I should have thought, if there were any Good for them, it would consist in their being made better.”

“I don’t see that,” objected Dennis; “it might be the best possible thing, for them, to be eliminated.”

“But in that case,” I said, “the best possible thing would be absence of Bad, not Good. And so far as we could talk of Good at all, we could not apply it to them?”

“Perhaps not”

“Well then, in that case we have to fall back upon the other alternative, and say that by the Good of the species we mean that of the ultimately selected individuals.”

“Well, what then?”

“Why, then, we return, do we not, to the position of Parry, that the Good is that of some particular generation? And there, too, we were met by difficulties. So that altogether I do not really see what meaning to attach to Wilson’s conception.”

“There is no meaning to be attached to it!” cried Ellis. “The species is a mere screen invented to conceal the massacre of individuals. I’m sick of these biologico-sociologico-anthropologico-histórico treatises, with their talk of races, of nations, of classes, never of men! their prate about laws as if they were the real entities, and the people who are supposed to be subject to them mere indifferent particles of stuff! their analysis of the perfection with which the machine works, its combinations, differentiations, subordinations, co-ordinations, and all the other abominations of desolations standing where they ought not, as depressing to the mind as they are cacophonous to the ear! and, worst of all, their impudent demand that we should admire the diabolical process! Admire! As though we should be asked to admire the beauty of the rack and the thumbscrew!”

“It’s a matter of taste, no doubt,” said Wilson, “but in me the spectacle of natural law does awaken feelings of admiration.”

“In me,” replied Ellis, “it awakens, just as often, feelings of disgust, and especially when its theatre is human life.”

“At any rate, whether you admire it or not, the spectacle is there.”

“No doubt, if you choose to look at it; but why should you? It’s not a good drama; it isn’t up to date; it has no first-hand knowledge, nor original vision of life. It simply ignores all the important facts.”

“Which do you call the important facts?”

“Why, of course, the emotions; the hopes, fears, aspirations, sympathies and the rest! There’s more valuable information contained in even an inferior novel that in all the sociological treatises that ever have been or will be written.”

“Oh, come!” cried Parry.

“I assure you,” replied Ellis, “I am serious. Take, for example, these unfortunate creatures who are in process of elimination. To the sociologist their elimination is their only raison d’etre. He cancels them out with the same delight as if they were figures in a complex fraction. But pick up any novel dealing with the life of the slums, and you find that these figures are really composed of innumerable individual units, existing each for himself, and each his own sufficient justification, each a sacred book comprising its own unique secret, a master-piece of the divine tragedian, a universe self-moved and self-contained, a centre of infinity, a mirror of totality, in a word, a human soul.”

“All that I altogether deny,” said Wilson, “but, even if it were true, it would not affect the sociological laws.”

“I don’t say it would. I only say that the sociological laws are as unimportant, if possible, as the law of gravitation.”

“Which,” replied Wilson, “may be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of your view.”

“Anyhow,” I interposed, “we are digressing from our point. What I really want to know is whether Wilson has any more light to throw on my difficulties with regard to his notion of the species.”

“I have nothing more to say,” he replied, “than I have said already.”

“But I have!” cried Dennis, “and something very much to the point. You see now the absurdities into which you are led by the position you insisted on assuming, that Good involves conscious activity. If it does, as you rightly inquired (though with a suicidal audacity), conscious activity in whom? And to that question, of course, you can find no answer.”

“And yet,” I said, endeavouring to turn the tables upon him, “I have known you to maintain yourself that Good not merely involves, but is, a conscious activity; only an activity in or of God.”

“Rather,” he replied, “that it is God. But I don’t really know whether we ought to call God a conscious activity. Whatever He or It be, is something that transcends our imagination. Only the things we call good are somehow reflexes of God; and we have to accept them as such without further inquiry. At any rate, we have no right to endeavour, as you keep doing, to locate Good in some individual persons.”

“Well,” I said, “here we come again to a fundamental difference of view. All the Good of which I am aware as actually existing is associated, somehow or other, with personal consciousness. I am willing to admit, for the sake of argument, that the ultimate Good, if ever we come to know it, might, perhaps, not be so associated. But of that, as yet, I know nothing; you, perhaps, are more fortunate. And if you can give us an account of Good, I mean, of course, of its content, which shall represent it intelligibly to us as independent of any consciousness like our own, I am quite ready to relinquish the argument to you.”

“I don’t know,” he replied, “that I can represent It to you in a way that you would admit to be intelligible. I don’t profess to have had what you call ‘experience’ of it.”

“Well, then,” said Ellis, “what’s the good of talking?”

“What, indeed!” I echoed, in some despondency. For I began to feel it was impossible to carry on the conversation. But at this point, to my great relief, Bartlett came to the rescue, not indeed with a solution of the difficulty in which we were involved, but with a diversion of which I was only too glad to take advantage.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that you are getting off the track! Whatever the ultimate Good may be, what we really want to know, is the kind of thing we can conceive to be good for people like ourselves. And I thought that was what you were going to discuss.”

“So I was,” I said, “if Dennis would have let me.”

“I will let you, by all means,” Dennis interposed, “so long as it is quite understood that everything you say has nothing to do with the real subject.”

“Very well,” said Bartlett, “that’s understood. And now let’s get along, on the basis of you and me and the man in the street. What are we trying to get, when we try to get Good? That I take it is the real question.”

“And I can only answer,” I said, “as I did before, that we are trying to get some state of conscious experience, to enter into some activity.”

“Very well, then, what activity?” he inquired, catching me up sharp, as if he were afraid of Dennis interposing again.

“What activity!” cried Ellis, “why all and every one as much as another, and the more the merrier.”

“What!” I exclaimed, rather taken aback, “all at once do you mean? whether they be good or whether they be bad, all alike indifferently?”

“There are no bad activities,” he replied, “none bad essentially in themselves. Their goodness and badness depends on the way in which they are interchanged or combined. Any pursuit or occupation palls in time if it is followed exclusively; but all may be delightful in the just measure and proportion. We are complex creatures, and we ought to employ all our faculties alike, never one alone at the cost of all the others.”

“That may be sound enough,” I said, “but will you not describe more in detail the kind of life which you consider to be good?”

“How can I?” he replied. “It is like trying to sum infinity! The most I can do is to hint and rhapsodize.”

“Hint away, then!” cried Parry; “rhapsodize away! we’re all listening.”

“Well, then,” he said, “my ideal of the good life would be to move in a cycle of ever-changing activity, tasting to the full the peculiar flavour of each new phase in the shock of its contrast with that of all the rest. To pass, let us say, from the city with all its bustle, smoke, and din, its press of business, gaiety, and crime, straight away, without word or warning, breaking all engagements, to the farthest and loneliest corner of the world. To hunt or fish for weeks and months in strange wild places, camping out among strange beasts and birds, lost in pathless forests, or wandering over silent plains. Then, suddenly, back in the crowd, to feel the press of business, to make or lose millions in a week, to adventure, compete, and win; but always, at the moment when this might pall, with a haven of rest in view, an ancient English mansion, stately, formal, and august, islanded, over its sunken fence, by acres of buttercups. There to study, perhaps to write, perhaps to experiment, dreaming in my garden at night of new discoveries, to revolutionize science and bring the world of commerce to my feet. Then, before I have time to tire, to be off on my travels again, washing gold in Klondike, trading for furs in Siberia, fighting in Madagascar, in Cuba, or in Crete, or smoking hasheesh in tents with Persian mystics. To make my end action itself, not anything action may gain, choosing not to pursue the Good for fear I should let slip Goods, but, in my pursuit of Goods, attaining the only Good I can conceive a full and harmonious exercise of all my faculties and powers.”

On hearing him speak thus I felt, I confess, such a warmth of sympathy that I hesitated to attempt an answer. But Leslie, who was young enough still to live mainly in ideas, broke in with his usual zeal and passion.

“But,” he said, “all this activity of which you speak is no more good than it is bad; every phase of it, by your own confession, is so imperfect in itself that it requires to be constantly exchanged for some other, equally defective.”

“Not at all,” answered Ellis, “each phase is good in its time and place; but each becomes bad if it is pursued exclusively to the detriment of others.”

“But is each good in itself? or, at least, is it more good than bad? You choose, in imagination, to dwell upon the good aspect of each; but in practice you would have to experience also the bad. Your hunting in trackless forests will involve exposure, fatigue, and hunger; your fighting in Madagascar, fever, wounds, and disillusionment; and so through all your chapter of accidents for accidents they are at best, and never the substance of Good; rather, indeed, a substance of Evil, dogged by a shadow of Good.”

“Oh!” cried Ellis, “what a horrid prosaic view from an idealist, too! Why, the Bad is all part of the Good; one takes the rough with the smooth. Or rather the Good stands above what you call good and bad; it consists in the activity itself which feeds upon both alike. If I were Dennis I should say it is the synthesis of both.”

“Well,” said Leslie, “I never heard before of a synthesis produced by one side of the antithesis simply swallowing the other.”

“Didn’t you?” said Ellis. “Then you have a great deal yet to learn. This is known as the synthesis of the lion and the lamb.”

“Oh, synthesis!” cried Parry. “Heaven save us from synthesis! What is it you are trying to say?”

“That’s what I want to know,” I said “We seem to be coming perilously near to Dennis’s position, that what we call Evil is mere appearance.”

“Well,” said Ellis, “extremes meet! Dennis arrived at his view by a denial of the world; I arrive at mine by an affirmation of it.”

“But do you really think,” I urged, “that everything in the world is good?”

“I think,” he replied, “that everything may be made to minister to Good if you approach it in the proper way.”

“That reads,” said Audubon, “like an extract from a sermon.”

“As I remarked before,” replied Ellis, “extremes meet”

“But, Ellis,” I protested, “do explain! How are you going to answer Leslie?”

“Leslie is really too young,” he replied, “to be answerable at all. But if you insist on my being serious, what I meant to suggest is, that when our activity is freshest and keenest we find delight in what is called Evil no less than in what is called Good. The complexity of the world charms us, its ‘downs’ as well as its ‘ups,’ its abysses and glooms no less than its sunny levels. We would not alter it if we could; it is better than we could make it; and we accept it not merely with acquiescence but with triumph.”

“Oh, do we!” said Audubon.

“We,” answered Ellis, “not you! You, of course, do not accept anything.”

“But who are ’we’?” asked Leslie.

“All of us,” he replied, “who try to make an art of living. Yes, art, that is the word! To me life appears like a great tragi-comedy. It has its shadows as well as its lights, but we would not lose one of them, for fear of destroying the harmony of the whole. Call it good, or call it bad, no matter, so it is. The villain no less than the hero claims our applause; it would be dull without him. We can’t afford to miss anything or anyone.”

“In fact,” cried Audubon, “‘Konx Ompax! Totality!’ You and Dennis are strangely agreed for once!”

“Yes,” he replied, “but for very different reasons, as the judge said on the one occasion when he concurred with his colleagues. Dennis accepts the Whole because he finds it a perfect logical system; I, because I find it a perfect work of art. His prophet is Hegel; mine is Walt Whitman.”

“Walt Whitman! And you profess to be an artist!”

“So was he, not in words but in life. One thing to him was no better nor worse than another; small and great, high and low, good and bad, he accepts them all, with the instinctive delight of an actual physical contact. Listen to him!” And he began to quote:

“I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of
the wren,
And the tree-toad is a ‘chef-d’oeuvre’ for the highest;
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow-crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

“That’s all very well,” objected Leslie, “though, of course, it’s rather absurd; but it does not touch the question of evil at all.”

“Wait a bit,” cried Ellis, “he’s ready for you there.”

“I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of
wickedness also.
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejector’s gait,
I moisten the roots of all that grows.”

“This is the meal equally set, this is the meat for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous, I make appointment
with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or kept away,
The kept-woman, spunger, thief are hereby invited,
The heavy-lipped slave is invited, the venerealee is invited;
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.”

“That’s rather strong,” remarked Parry.

“Don’t you like it?” Ellis inquired.

“I think I might like it if I were drunk.”

“Ah, but a poet, you see, is always drunk!”

’Well, I unfortunately, am often sober; and then I find the sponger and the venerealee anything but agreeable objects.”

“Besides,” said Audubon, “though it’s very good of Walt Whitman to invite us all, the mere fact of dining with him, however miscellaneous the company, doesn’t alter the character of the dinner.”

“No,” cried Leslie, “and that’s just the point Ellis has missed all through. Even if it be true that the world appears to him as a work of art, it doesn’t appear so to the personages of the drama. What’s play to him is grim earnest to them; and, what’s more, he himself is an actor not a mere spectator, and may have that fact brought home to him, any moment, in his flesh and blood.”

“Of course!” replied Ellis, “and I wouldn’t have it otherwise. The point of the position is that one should play one’s part oneself, but play it as an artist with one’s eye upon the total effect, never complaining of Evil merely because one happens to suffer, but taking the suffering itself as an element in the aesthetic perfection of the Whole.”

“I should like to see you doing that,” said Bartlett, rather brutally, “when you were down with a fit of yellow fever.”

“Or shut up in a mad-house,” said Leslie.

“Or working eight hours a day at business,” said Audubon, “with the thermometer 100 degrees in the shade.”

“Oh well,” answered Ellis, “those are the confounded accidents of our unhealthy habits of life.”

“I am afraid,” I said, “they are accidents very essential to the substance of the world.”

“Besides,” cried Parry, “there’s the whole moral question, which you seem to ignore altogether. If there be any activity that is good, it must be, I suppose, the one that is right; and the activity you describe seems to have nothing to do with right and wrong.”

“Right and wrong! Right and wrong!” echoed Ellis,

“Das hoer ich sechzlg Jahre wiederholen,
Ich fluche drauf, aber verstohlen.”

“You may curse as much as you like,” replied Parry, “but you can hardly deny that there is an intimate connection between Good and Right.”

Instead of replying Ellis began to whistle; so I took up Parry’s point and said, “Yes, but what is the connection? My own idea is that Right is really a means to Good. And I should separate off all activity that is merely a means from that which is really an end in itself, and good.”

“But is there any activity,” objected Leslie, “which is not merely a means?”

“Oh yes,” I said, “I should have thought so. Most men, it seems to me, are well enough content with what they are doing for its own sake; even though at the same time they have remoter ends in view, and if these were cut off would cease, perhaps, to take pleasure in the work of the moment. The attitude is not very logical, perhaps, but I think it is very common. Why else is it that men who believe and maintain that they only work in order to make money, nevertheless are so unwilling to retire when the money is made; or, if they do, are so often dissatisfied and unhappy?”

“Oh,” said Audubon, “that is only because boredom is worse than pain. It is not that they find any satisfaction in their work; it’s only that they find even greater distress in idleness.”

“But, surely,” I replied, “even you yourself would hardly maintain that there is nothing men do for its own sake, and because they take delight in it. If there were nothing else at least there is play and I have known you play cricket yourself!”

“Known him play cricket!” cried Ellis. “Why, if he had his way, he would do nothing else, except at the times when he was riding or shooting.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s enough, for the moment, to refute him. And, in fact, I suppose none of us would seriously maintain that there is no form of activity which men feel to be good for its own sake, though the Good of course may be partial and precarious.”

“No,” said Ellis, “I should rather inquire whether there is any form which they pursue merely and exclusively as a means to something else.”

“Oh, surely!” I said. “One might mention, for instance, the act of visiting the dentist. Or what is more important, and what, I suppose, Parry had in his mind, there is the whole class of activities which one distinguishes as moral.”

“Do you mean to say,” said Parry, “that moral action has no Good in itself but is only a means to some other Good?”

“I don’t know,” I replied; “I am rather inclined to think so. But it all depends upon how we define it.”

“And how do you define it?”

“I should say that its specific quality consists in the refusal to seize some immediate and inferior Good with a view to the attainment of one that is remoter but higher.”

“Oh, well, of course,” cried Leslie, “if you define it so, your proposition follows of itself.”

“So I thought,” I said. “But how would you define it?”

“I should say it is a free and perfect activity in Good.”

“In that case, it is of course the very activity we are in quest of, and we should come upon it, if we were successful, at the end of our inquiry. But I was supposing that the essence of morality is expressed in the word ‘ought’; and in that I take to be implied the definition I suggested namely, action pursued not for its own sake, but for the sake of something else.”

“Oh, oh!” cried Dennis, “there I really must protest! I’ve kept silent as long as I possibly could; but when it comes to describing as a mere means the only kind of activity which is an end in itself

“The only kind that is an end in itself!” I repeated, in some dismay. “Is that really what you think?”

“Of course it is! why not?”

“I don’t know. I have always supposed that, when we are doing what we ought, we are acting with a view to some ultimate Good.”

“Well, I, on the contrary, believe that we ought absolutely, without reference to anything else. It is a unique form of activity, dependent on nothing but itself; and for anything we have yet shown, it may be the Good we are in quest of.”

This suggestion, unexpected as it was, threw me into great perplexity. I did not see exactly how to meet it; yet it awakened no response in me, nor as I thought In any of the others. But while I was hesitating, Leslie began:

“Do you mean that the Good might consist simply in doing what we ought, without any other accompaniment or conditions?”

“Yes, I think it might.”

“So that, for example, a man might be in possession of the Good, even while he was being racked or burnt alive, so long only as he was doing what he ought”

“Yes, I suppose he might be.”

“It’s a trifle paradoxical,” said Ellis.

“In fact,” added Bartlett, “it might be called nonsense.”

“I don’t see why,” replied Dennis; “for we haven’t yet shown that the Good is dependent on the things we call good.”

“No,” I said, “but we did show or at least for the time being we agreed to admit that it must have some relation to what we call goods; that they do somehow or other, and more or less, express its nature; and indeed our whole present inquiry is based upon the hypothesis that it is by examining goods that we may get to know something about the Good. So that I do not see how we can entertain an idea of Good which flatly contradicts all our experience of goods.”

“Well,” said Dennis, “I ought perhaps to modify the position. Let us say that the Good consists in the activity of doing what we ought, only that activity can’t exist in its true perfection unless everybody participates in it at once. But if everybody participated in it, there would be no more burnings; and so Leslie’s difficulty would not arise.”

“Well,” I said, “the modification is very radical! But even so, I don’t know what to make of the position. For it is very difficult to conceive a society perpetually and exclusively occupied, so to speak, in ‘oughting.’ Just imagine the kind of life It would be without pleasure, without business, without knowledge, without anything at all analogous to what we call good, purged wholly and completely of all that might taint the purity of the moral sense, of philanthropy, of friendship, of love, even, I suppose, of the love of virtue, a life simply of obligation, without anything to be obliged to except a law.”

“But,” he protested, “you are taking an absurd and impossible case.”

“I am taking the case which you yourself put, when you said that Good consisted simply in doing what one ought, independently of all other accompaniment or condition. But perhaps that is not what you really meant?”

“No,” he said; “of course, what I meant was that it is life according to the moral law that is Good; but I did not intend to separate the law from the life, and call it Good all by itself.”

“But is the life the better for the law, in the sense, I mean, in which law involves constraint? Or would it not be better still if the same life were pursued freely for its own sake?”

“Perhaps so.”

“But, then, in that case, the more we realized Good the less we should be aware of obligation. And would a life without conscious and felt obligation be a life specifically ethical, in the sense in which you seemed to be using the word?”

“I should think not; for ‘ought’ in the ethical sense does certainly seem to me to involve the idea of obligation.”

“In that case it would seem to be truer to say that activity is Good, not in so far as it is ethical but precisely in so far as it is not. At any rate, I should maintain that we come nearer to a realization of Good in the activities which we pursue without effort or friction, than in those which involve a struggle between duty and inclination.”

“But the activities we pursue without effort or friction often enough are bad.”

“No doubt; but some of them are good, and it is to those I should look for the best idea I could form of what Good might be.”

“Well,” he said, “go on! Once more I have entered my protest; and now I leave the road clear.”

“The worst of you is,” said Ellis, “that you always turn up in front! When we think we have passed you once for all, you take a short cut across the fields, and there you are in the middle of the road, with the same old story, that we’re altogether on the wrong track.”

“Well,” said Dennis, sententiously, “I do my duty.”

“And,” replied Ellis, “no doubt you have your reward! Proceed!” he continued, turning to me.

“Well,” I said, “I suppose I must try to go through to the end, though these tactics of Dennis make me very nervous. I shall suppose, however, that I have convinced him that it is not in ethical activity as such that we can expect to find the most perfect example of Good. And now I propose to examine in turn some other of our activities, starting with that which seems to be the most primitive of all.”

“And which is that?”

“I was thinking of the activity of our bodily senses, our direct contact, so to speak, with objects, without the intermediation of reflection, through the touch, the sight, the hearing, and the rest. Is there anything in all this which we could call good?”

“Is there anything!” cried Ellis. “What a question to ask!” And he broke out with the lines from Browning’s “Saul”:

“Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy.”

The quotation seemed to loosen all tongues; and there followed a flood of such talk as may be heard in almost every company of Englishmen, in praise of sport and physical exercise, touched with a sentiment not far removed from poetry the only poetry of which they are not half-ashamed. Audubon even joined in, forgetting for the moment his customary pose, and rhapsodizing with the rest over his favourite pursuits of snipe-shooting and cricket. Much of this talk was lost upon me, for I am nothing of a sportsman; but some touches there were that recalled experiences of my own, and for that reason, I suppose, have lingered in my memory. Thus, I recollect, some one spoke of skating on Derwentwater, the miles of black, virgin ice, the ringing and roaring of the skates, the sunset glow, and the moon rising full over the mountains; and another recalled a bathe on the shore of AEgina, the sun on the rocks and the hot scent of the firs, as though the whole naked body were plunged in some aethereal liqueur, drinking it in with every sense and at every pore, like a great sponge of sheer sensation. After some minutes of this talk, as I still sat silent, Ellis turned to me with the appeal, “But what about you, who are supposed to be our protagonist? Here are we all rhapsodizing and you sit silent. Have you nothing to contribute to your own theme?”

“Oh,” I replied, “any experiences of mine would be so trivial they would be hardly worth recording. The most that could be said of them would be that they might, perhaps, illustrate more exactly than yours what one might call the pure Goods of sense. For, as far as I can understand, the delights you have been describing are really very complex. In addition to pleasures of mere sensation, there is clearly an aesthetic charm you kept speaking of heather and sunrises, and colours and wide prospects; and then there is the satisfaction you evidently feel in skill, acquiring or acquired, and in the knowledge you possess of the habits of beasts and birds. All this, of course, goes beyond the delight of simple sense perception, though, no doubt, inextricably bound up with it But what I was thinking of at first was something less complex and more elementary in which, nevertheless, I think we can detect Good Good of sheer unadulterated sensation. Think, for example, of the joys of a cold bath when one is dusty and hot! You will laugh at me, but sometimes when I have felt the water pouring down my back I have shouted to myself in my tub ’nunc dimittis.’”

They burst out laughing, and Ellis cried:

“You gross sensualist! And to think of all this being concealed behind that masque of austere philosophy!”

Then they set off again In praise of the delights of such simple sensations, and especially of those of the palate, instancing, I remember, the famous tale about Keats how he covered his tongue and throat with cayenne pepper that he might enjoy, as he said, “the delicious coolness of claret in all its glory.” And when this had gone on for some time, “Perhaps enough has been said,” I began, “to illustrate this particular kind of Good. We have, I think, recognized to the full its merits; and we shall be equally ready, I suppose, to recognize its defects.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Ellis. “I, for my part, at any rate, shall be very loth to dwell upon them. I sometimes think these are the only pure Goods.”

“But at least,” I replied, “you will admit that they are precarious. It is only at moments, and at moments that come and go without choice of ours, that this harmonious relation becomes established between our senses and the outer world. The very same things which at such times appear to be perfectly at one with ourselves, as if they had been made for us and we for them, we see and feel to have also a nature not only distinct but even alien and hostile to our own. The water which cools our skin and quenches our thirst also drowns; the fire which warms and comforts also burns; and so on through all the chapter I need not weary you with details. Nature, you will agree, not only ministers to our bodies, she torments and destroys them; she is our foe in ways at least as varied and efficacious as she is our friend.”

“But,” objected Ellis, “that is only because we don’t treat her properly; we have to learn how to manage her.”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “though I should prefer to say, we have to learn how to fight and subdue her. But in any case we have laid our finger here upon a defect in this first kind of Goods they are, as I said, precarious. And the discovery of that fact, one might say, was the sword of the angel that drove man out of his imaginary Eden. For at first we may suppose him, (if Wilson will permit me to romance a little,) seizing every delight as it offered itself, under an instinctive impression that there were nothing but delights to be met with, eating when he was hungry, drinking when he was thirsty, sleeping when he was tired, and so on, in unquestioning trust of his natural impulses. But then, as he learnt by experience how evil follows good, and pleasure often enough is bought by pain, he would begin, would he not, instead of simply accepting Good where it is, to endeavour to create it where it is not, sacrificing often enough the present to the future, and rejecting many immediate delights for the sake of those more remote? And this involves a complete change in his attitude; for he is endeavouring now to establish by his own effort that harmony between himself and the world which he fondly hoped at first was immediately given.”

“But,” objected Wilson, “he never did hope anything of the kind. This reconstruction of the past is all imaginary.”

“I dare say it may be,” I replied, “but that is of little consequence, if it helps us to seize our point more clearly; for we are not at present writing history. Man, then, we will suppose, is thus set out upon what is, whether he knows it or not, his quest to create, since he is unable to find ready-made, a world of objects harmonious to himself. But in this quest has he been, should you say, successful?”

“More or less, I suppose,” answered Parry, “for he is progressively satisfying his needs, even if they are never completely satisfied.”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “though I sometimes have my doubts. The relation of man to nature, I have thought, is very strange and obscure. It is as though he began with the idea that he had only to remove a few blemishes from her face to make her completely accordant with his desire. But no sooner has he gone to work than these surface blemishes, as he thought them, prove to have roots deeper than all his probings; the more he cuts away the more he exposes of an element radically alien to himself, terrible and incomprehensible, branching wide and striking deep, and throwing up from depths unknown those symptoms and symbols of itself which he mistook for mere superficial stains.”

“Really,” protested Parry, “I see no grounds for such a view.”

“Perhaps not,” I said, “but anyhow you will, I suppose, admit that a certain precariousness does attach to these Goods of sense, whether they be freely offered by nature or painfully acquired by the labour of man.”

“Not necessarily,” he objected, “for we are constantly reducing to order and routine what was once haphazard and uncontrolled. For the great mass of civilized men the primitive goods of life, food, shelter, clothing and the like, are practically secured against all chance.”

“Are they?” cried Bartlett, “I admire your optimism!”

“And I too,” I said. “But even granting that it were as you say, we are then met by this curious fact, that the Goods we really care about, in our practical activity, are never those that are secure but those that are precarious. As soon as we are safe against one risk we proceed to take another, so that there is always a margin, as it were, of precarious Goods, and those exactly the ones which we hold most precious.”

“In fact,” said Audubon, “as soon as you get your Good it ceases to be good. That’s precisely what I am always saying.”

“Then,” I said, “there is the less need to labour the point. One way or other, it seems, either because they are difficult to secure, or because, when secured, they lose their specific quality. Goods of this kind are caught in the wheels of chance and change, whether they be offered to man by the free gift of Nature, or wrung from her in the sweat of his brow. In other words, they are, as I said, precarious. And now, have they any other defects?”

“Have they any?” cried Leslie, “why they have nothing else!”

“Well,” I said, “but what in particular?”

“Oh,” he replied, “it’s all summed up, I suppose, in the fact that they are Goods of sense, and not of intellect or of imagination.”

“Is it then,” I asked, “a defect in content that you are driving at? Do you mean that they satisfy only a part of our nature, not the whole? For that, I suppose, would be equally true of the other Goods you mentioned, such as those of the intellect.”

“Yes,” he replied, “but it is the inferior part to which the Goods we are speaking of appeal.”

“Perhaps; but in what respect inferior?”

“Why, simply as the body is inferior to the soul.”

“But how is that? You will think me very stupid, but the more I think of it the less I understand this famous distinction between body and soul, and the relation of one to the other.”

“I doubt,” said Wilson, “whether there is a distinction at all.”

“I don’t say that,” I replied. “I only say that I can’t understand it; and I should be thankful, if possible, to keep it out of our discussion.”

“So should I!” said Wilson.

“Well, but,” Leslie protested, “how can we?”

“I think perhaps we might,” I said. “For instance, in the case before us, why should we not try directly to define that specific property of the Goods of sense which, according to you, constitutes their defect, without having recourse to these difficult terms body and soul at all?”

“Well,” he agreed, “we might try.”

“What, then” I said, “do you suggest?”

He hesitated a little, and then began in a tentative kind of way:

“I think what I feel about these Goods is that we are somehow their slaves; they possess us, instead of our possessing them. They come upon us we hardly know how or whence; they satisfy our desires we can’t tell why; our relation to them seems to be passive rather than active.”

“And that, you think, would not be the case with a true and perfect Good?”

“No, I think not”

“How, then, should we feel towards such a Good?”

“We should feel, I think, that it was somehow an expression of ourselves, and we of it; that it was its nature and its whole nature to present itself as a Good and our nature and our whole nature to experience it as such. There would be nothing in It alien to us and nothing in us alien to it.”

“Whereas in the case of Goods of sense ?”

“Whereas in their case,” he said, “surely nothing of the kind applies. For these Goods appear to arise in things and under circumstances which have quite another nature than that of being good for us. It is not the essence of water to quench our thirst, of fire to cook for us, or of the sun to give us light

“Or of cork-trees to stop our ginger-beer bottles,” added Ellis.

“Quite so,” he continued; “in every case these things that do us good are also quite as ready to do us harm, and, for that matter, to do innumerable things which have no relation to us at all. So that the goodness they have in them, so far as it is goodness to our senses, they have, as it were, only by accident; and we feel that essentially either they are not Goods, or their goodness is something beyond and different from that which is revealed to sense.”

“Your quarrel, then” I said, “with the Goods of sense, so far as I understand you, is that they inhere, as it were, in a substance which, so far as we can tell, is indifferent to Good, or at any rate to Good of that kind?”

“Yes.”

“Whereas a true Good, you think, must be good in essence and substance?”

“Yes; don’t you think so too?”

“I do,” I replied, “but how about the others?”

Dennis assented, and the others did not object, not appearing, indeed, to have attended much to the argument. So I continued, “We have then, so far, discovered in this class of Goods, two main defects, the first, that they are precarious; the second, which is closely connected with the other, and is in fact, I suppose, its explanation, that they are, shall we say, accidental, understanding the word in the sense we have just defined. Now, let us see if we cannot find any class of Goods similar to these, but free from their defects.”

“But similar in what respect,” he asked, “if they are not to have similar defects?”

“Similar, I meant, in being direct presentations to sense.”

“But are there any such Goods?”

“I think so,” I said. “What do you say to works of Art? These, are they not, are direct presentations to sense? Yet such that it is their whole nature and essence on the one hand to be beautiful, and to that extent Good for I suppose you will admit that the Beautiful is a kind of Good; and on the other hand, if I may dare to say so, to be, in a certain sense, eternal.”

“Eternal!” cried Ellis, “I only wish they were! What wouldn’t we give for the works of Polygnotus and Apelles!”

“Oh yes,” I said, “of course, in that way, regarded as material objects, they are as perishable as all the works of nature. But I was talking of them as Art, not as mere things; and from that point of view, surely, each is a moment, or a series of moments, cut away, as it were, from the contact of chance or change and set apart in a timeless world of its own, never of its own nature, to pass into something else, but only through the alien nature of the matter to which it is bound.”

“What do you mean?” cried Parry. “I am quite at sea.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “you will understand the point better if I give it you in the words of a poet.”

And I quoted the well-known stanzas from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d.
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone;
Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!

“Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”

“Well,” said Parry, when I had done, “that’s very pretty; but I don’t see how it bears on the argument.”

“I think,” I replied, “that it illustrates the point I wanted to make. Part, I mean, of the peculiar charm of works of Art consists in the fact that they arrest a fleeting moment of delight, lift it from our sphere of corruption and change, and fix it like a star in the eighth heaven.”

“Yes,” said Ellis, “we grant you that”

“Or at least,” added Parry, “we don’t care to dispute it”

“And the other point which I want to make is, I think, clearer still that the Good of works of Art, that is to say their Beauty, results from the very principle of their nature, and is not a mere accident of circumstances.”

“Of course,” said Leslie, “their Beauty is their only raison d’etre?”

“And yet,” I went on, “they are still Goods of sense, and so far resemble the other Goods of which we were speaking before.”

“Yes,” said Dennis, “but with what a difference! That is the point I have been waiting to come to.”

“What point?” I asked.

“Why,” he said, “in the case of what you call Goods of sense, in their simplest and purest form, making abstraction from all aesthetic and other elements as in the example you gave of a cold bath the relation of the object to the sense is so simple and direct, that really, if we were to speak accurately, we should have, I think, to say, that so far as the perception of Good is concerned the object is merged in the subject, and what you get is simply a good sensation.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed, “that is how we ought to put it. But at the time I did not think it necessary to be so precise.”

“But it has become necessary now, I think,” he replied, “if we are to bring out a characteristic of works of Art which will throw light, I believe, on the general nature of Good.”

“What characteristic is that?”

“Why,” he replied, “when we come to works of Art, the important thing is the object, not the subject; if there is any merging of the one in the other, it is the subject that is merged in the object, not vice versa. We have to contemplate the object, anyhow, as having a character of its own; and it is to this character that I want to draw attention.”

“In what respect?”

“In respect that every work of Art, and, for that matter, every work of nature so far as it can be viewed aesthetically comprises a number of elements necessarily connected in a whole; and this necessary connection is the point on which we ought to insist”

“But necessary how?” asked Wilson. “Do you mean logically necessary?”

“No,” he replied, “aesthetically. I mean, that we have a direct perception that nothing in the work could be omitted or altered without destroying the whole. This, at any rate, is the ideal; and it holds, more or less, in proportion as the work is more or less perfect. Everyone, I suppose, who understands these things would agree to that.”

No one seemed inclined to dispute the statement; certainly I was not, myself; so I answered, “No doubt what you say is true of works of Art; but will your contention be that it is also true of Good in general?”

“Yes,” he said, “I think so, in so far at least as Good is to be conceived as comprising a number of elements. For no one, I suppose, would imagine that such elements might be thrown together haphazard and yet constitute a good whole.”

“I suppose not,” I agreed, “and, if you are right, what we seem to have arrived at is this: among the works which man creates in his quest of the Good, there is one class, that of works of Art, which, in the first place, may be said, in a sense, to be not precarious, seeing that by their form, through which they are Art, they are set above the flux of time, though by their matter, we admit, they are bound to it And, in the second place, the Good which they have, they have by virtue of their essence; Good is their substance, not an accident of their changing relations. And, lastly, being complex wholes, the parts of which they are composed are bound together in necessary connection. These characteristics, at any rate, we have discovered in works of Art: and no doubt many more might be discoverable. But now, let us turn to the other side, and consider the defects in which this class of Goods is involved.”

“Ah!” cried Bartlett, “when you come to that, I have something to say.”

“Well,” I said, “what is it? We shall be glad of any help.”

“It can be summed up,” he replied, “in a single word. Whatever may be the merits of a work of Art and they may be all that you say it has this one grand defect it isn’t real!”

“Real!” cried Leslie. “What is real? The word’s the plague of my life! People use it as if they meant something by it, something very tremendous and august, and when you press them they never know what it is. They talk of ’real life’ real life! what is it? As if one life wasn’t as real as another!”

“Oh, as to real life,” said Ellis, “I can tell you what that is. Real life is the shady side of life.”

“Nonsense,” said Parry, “real life is the life of men of the world.”

“Or,” retorted Ellis, “more generally, it is the life of the person speaking, as opposed to that of the person to whom he speaks.”

“Well, but,” I interposed, “it is not ‘real life’ that is our present concern, but Bartlett’s meaning when he used the word ‘real.’ In what sense is Art not real?”

“Why,” he replied, “by your own confession Art is something ideal. It is beautiful, it is good, it is lifted above chance and change; its connection with matter, that is to say with reality, is a kind of flaw, an indecency from which we discreetly turn our eyes. The real world is nothing of all this; on the contrary, it is ugly, brutal, material, coarse, and bad as bad can be!”

“I don’t see that it is at all!” cried Leslie, “and, even if it were, you have no right to assume that that is the reality of it. How do you know that its reality doesn’t consist precisely in the Ideal, as all poets and philosophers have thought? And, in that case, Art would be more real than what you would call Reality, because it would represent the essence of the world, the thing it would like to be if it could, and is, so far as it can. That was Aristotle’s view, anyhow.”

“Then all I can say is,” replied Bartlett, “that I don’t agree with Aristotle! Anyhow, even if Art represents what the world would like to be, it certainly doesn’t represent what it is.”

“I don’t know; surely it does, sometimes,” said Parry, “for instance, there’s the realistic novel!”

“Oh, that!” cried Ellis. “That’s the most ideal of all only it’s apt to be such bad idealism!”

“Anyhow,” said Bartlett, “in so far as it is real, it’s not Art, in the sense, in which we have been using the word.”

I began to be afraid that we should drift away into a discussion of realism in Art. So, to recall the conversation to the point at issue, I turned to Bartlett, and said:

“Your criticism seems to me to be fair enough as far as it goes. You say that the world of Art is a world by itself; that side by side of it, and unaffected by it, moves the world of what you call real life. And that whatever be the relation between the two worlds, whether we are to say that the one imitates the other, or interprets it, or idealizes it, it does not, in any case, set it aside. Art is a refuge from life, not a substitute for it; a little blessed island in the howling sea of fact. Its Good is thus only a partial Good; whereas the true Good, I suppose, would be somehow universal.”

“Still,” said Leslie, “as far as it goes it is a Good without blemish.”

“I am not so sure,” I said, “even of that. I am inclined to think that Bartlett’s criticism, if we squeeze it tight, will yield us more than we have yet got out of it perhaps even more than he knows is in it”

“You don’t mean to say,” cried Bartlett, “that you are coming over to my side!”

“Yes,” I said, “like a spy to the enemy’s camp to see where your strength really lies.”

“I have no objection,” he replied, “if it ends in your discovering new defences for me.”

“Well,” I said, “we shall see. Anyhow, this is what I had in my mind. We were saying just now that when people talk about ‘real life,’ the ‘real world,’ and so on, they are not always very clear as to what they mean. But one thing, I think, perhaps they have obscurely in their heads that the Real is something from which you cannot escape; something which forces itself upon you without reference to choice or desire, having a nature of its own which may or may not conform, more or less to yours, but in any case is distinct and independent. That is why they would say, for example, that the illusions of a madman are not real, meaning that they do not represent real things, however vivid their appearance may be, because they are the productions merely of his own consciousness; whereas the very same appearances presented to a sane man would be called without hesitation real, because they would be conceived to proceed from objects having an independent nature of their own. Something of this kind, I suppose, is included in the notion ‘real’ as it is held by ordinary people.”

“Perhaps” said Leslie, “but what then? And how does it bear upon Art?”

“I am not sure,” I replied, “but it occurred to me that works of Art, though of course they are real objects, are such that a certain violence, as it were, has been done to their reality in our interest. What I mean will be best understood, I think, if we put ourselves for the moment into the position of the artist. To him certain materials are presented which of course are real in our present acceptation of the term, being such as they are of their own nature, without any dependence upon him. Upon these materials he flings himself, and shapes them according to his desire, impressing, as it were, his own nature upon theirs, till they confront him as a kind of image of himself in an alien stuff. So far, then, he has a Good, and a Good presented to him as real; but for the Goodness of this reality he is himself responsible. In so far as it is, so to speak, merely real, it has still the nature which was first presented to him, before he began his work a nature indifferent, if not opposed, to all his operations, as is shown by the fact that it changes and passes away into something else, just as it would have done if he had never touched it. To this nature he has, as I said, done a certain violence in order to stamp upon it the appearance of Good; but the Good is still, in a sense, only an appearance; the reality of the thing remains independent and alien. So that what the man has found, in so far as he has found Good, is after all only a form of himself; and one can conceive him feeling a kind of despair, like that of Wotan in the Walkuere, when in his quest for a free, substantial, self-subsistent Good he finds after all, for ever, nothing but images of himself:

“’Das Andre, das ich ersehne,
Das Andre, erseh’ ich nie.’

“I don’t know whether what I am saying is intelligible, for I find it rather hard to put it into words.”

“Yes,” he said, “I think I understand. But what you are saying, so far as it is true, seems to be true only for the artist himself. To all others the work of Art must appear as something independent of themselves.”

“True,” I said, “and yet I think that they too feel, or might be made to fed if it were brought home to them, this same antagonism between the nature of the stuff and the form that has been given to it. The form will seem from this point of view something factitious and artificial given to the stuff, not indeed by themselves, but by one like themselves, and in their interest. They will contrast, perhaps, as is often done, a picture of the landscape with the landscape Itself. The picture, they will say, however beautiful, is not a ‘natural’ Good, not a real Good, not a Good in its own right; it is a kind of makeshift produced by human effort, beautiful, if you will, admirable, if you will, to be sought, to be cherished, to be loved in default of a better, with the best faculties of brain and soul, but still not that ultimate thing we wanted, that Good in and of itself, as well as through and for us, Good by its own nature apart from our interposition, self-moved, self-determined, self-dependent, and in which alone our desires could finally rest. Don’t you think that some such feeling may, perhaps, be at the bottom of Bartlett’s criticism of Art as unreal?”

Bartlett laughed. “If so,” he said, “it is quite unknown to myself. For to tell the truth, I have not understood a word that you have said.”

“Well,” I said, “in that case, at any rate you can’t disagree with me. But what do the others think?” And I turned to Dennis and Leslie, for Wilson and Parry did not seem to be attending. Leslie assented with enthusiasm. But Dennis shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he said, “what to think about all that. It seems to me rather irrelevant to the work of Art as such.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “but surely not to the work of Art as Good? Or do you not agree with me that the true Good must be such purely of its own nature?”

“Perhaps so,” he replied; “it wants thinking over. But in any case I agree with you so far, that I should never place the Good in Art.”

“In what then?”

“I should be much more inclined to place it in Knowledge.”

“In Knowledge!” I repeated. “That seems to me very strange!”

“But why strange?” he said. “Surely there is good authority for the view. It was Aristotle’s for example, and Spinoza’s.”

“I know,” I replied, “and I used to think it was also mine. But of late I have come to realize more clearly what Knowledge is; and now I see, or seem to see, that whatever its value may be, it is something that falls very far short of Good.”

“Why,” he said, “what is your idea of Knowledge?”

“You had better ask Wilson,” I replied, “it is he who has instructed me.”

“Very well,” he said, “I appeal to Wilson.”

And Wilson, nothing loth, enunciated his definition of Knowledge.

“Knowledge,” he said, “is the description and summing up in brief formulae of the routine of our perceptions.”

“There!” I exclaimed. “No one, I suppose, would identify that with Good?”

“But” objected Dennis “in the first place, I don’t understand the definition; and, in the second place, I don’t agree with it.”

“As to understanding it,” replied Wilson, “there need be no difficulty there. You have only to seize clearly one or two main positions. First, that Knowledge is of perceptions only, not of things in themselves; secondly, that these perceptions occur in fixed routines; thirdly ...”

“But,” interrupted Dennis, “what is a perception? I suppose it’s a perception of something?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t know that it is.”

“What then? Simply a state in me?”

“Very likely.”

“Then does nothing exist except my states?”

“Nothing else exists primarily for you.”

“Then what about the world before I existed, and after I cease to exist?”

“You infer such a world from your states.”

“Then there is something besides my states this world which I infer; and that, I suppose, and not merely my perceptions, is the reality of which I have knowledge?”

“Not exactly,” he replied, “the fact is ...”

“I don’t think,” I interrupted, “that we ought to plunge into a discussion of the nature of Reality. It is Good with which we are at present concerned.”

“But,” said Dennis, “we wanted to find out the connection of Knowledge with Good; and to do so we must first discover what Knowledge is.”

“Well then,” I said, “let us first take Wilson’s account of Knowledge, and see what he makes of that with regard to Good; and then we will take yours, and see what we make of that. And if we don’t find that either satisfies the requirements of Good we will leave Knowledge and go on to something else.”

“Very well,” he replied, “I am content, so long as I get my chance.”

“You shall have your chance. But first we will take Wilson. And I dare say he will not keep us long. For you will hardly maintain, I suppose,” I continued, turning to him, “that Knowledge, as you define it, could be identified with Good?”

“I don’t know,” he said; “to tell the truth, I don’t much believe in Good, in any absolute sense. But that Knowledge, as I define it, is a good thing, I have no doubt whatever.”

“Neither have I,” I replied; “but good, as it seems to me, mainly as a means, in so far as it enables us to master Nature.”

“Well,” he said, “and what greater Good could there be?”

“I don’t dispute the greatness of such a Good. I merely wish to point out that if we look at it so, it is in the mastery of Nature that the Good in question consists, and not in the Knowledge itself. Or should you say that there is Good in the scientific activity itself, quite apart from any practical results to which it may lead?”

“Certainly,” he replied, “and the former, in my opinion, is the higher and more ideal Good.”

“This activity itself of inventing brief formulae to resume the routine of our perceptions?”

“Yes.”

“Well, but what is the Good of it? That is what it is so hard for a layman to get hold of. Does it consist in the discovery of Reality? For that, I could understand, would be good.”

“No,” he said, “for we do not profess to touch Reality. We deal merely with our perceptions.”

“So that when, for example, you conceive such and such a perfect fluid, or whatever you call it, and such and such motions in it, you do not suppose this fluid to be real.”

“No. It is merely a conception by means of which we are enabled to give an account of the order in which certain of our perceptions occur. But it is very satisfactory to be able to give such an account.”

“I suppose it must be,” I said, “but once more, could you say more precisely wherein the satisfaction consists? Is it, perhaps, in the discovery of necessary connections?”

“No,” he said, “we don’t admit necessity. We admit only an order which is, as a matter of fact, regular.”

“You say, for example, that it so happens that all bodies do move in relation to one another in the way summed up in the law of gravitation; but that you see no reason why they should?”

“Yes.”

“But ...” began Dennis, who had found difficulty all this time in restraining himself.

“One moment!” I pleaded, “let Wilson have his say.” And turning to him I continued: “If, then, the satisfaction to be derived from scientific activity does not consist in the discovery of Reality, nor yet in that of necessary connection, wherein should you say, does it consist? Perhaps in the regulating of expectation?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, that it is painful for us to live in a world in which we don’t know what to expect; it excites not only our fears and apprehensions, but also a kind of intellectual disgust. And, conversely, it is a relief and a pleasure to discover an order among our experiences, not only because it enables us the better to utilize them for our ends (for that belongs to the practical results of science), but because in itself we prefer order to disorder, even if no other advantage were to be got out of it.”

“I don’t know that we do!” objected Ellis, “it depends on the kind of order. An order of dull routine is far more intolerable than a disorder of splendid possibilities! Ask the Oriental why he objects to British rule! Simply because it is regular! He prefers the chances of rapine, violent and picturesque, to the dreary machine-like depredations of the tax-collector.”

“Yes,” I said, “but there you take in a number of complex factors. I was thinking merely of the Good to be got out of scientific activity as such. And I think there is an intellectual satisfaction in the discovery of order, even though it be dissociated from necessity.”

“No doubt there is,” said Wilson, “but I shouldn’t say that is the only reason for our delight in Knowledge. The fact is, Knowledge is an extension of experience, and is good simply as such. The sense of More and still More beyond what has yet been discovered, of new facts, new successions, new combinations, of ever fresh appeals to our interest, our wonder, our admiration, the mere excitement of discovery for its own sake, quite apart from anything else to which it may lead, a dash of adventure, too, a heightening of life that is what is the real spur to science and, to my mind, its sufficient justification.”

“But,” I objected, “that is rather an account of the general process of Experience than of the special one of Knowledge. No doubt there is an attraction in all activity Ellis has already expounded it; and all experience involves a kind of Knowledge; but what we wanted to get at was the special attraction of scientific activity; and that seems to be, so far as I can see, simply the discovery of order.”

“Well,” he said, “if you like what then?”

“Why, then,” I said, “we can easily see the defect in this kind of activity, when viewed from the standpoint of Good.”

“What is it?”

“Why, clearly, that that in which we discover the order may be bad. There is a science of disease as well as of health; and an activity concerned with the Bad could hardly be purely good, even though it were a discovery of order in the Bad. Or do you think that if all men were diseased, they would nevertheless be in possession of the Good, if only they had perfect knowledge of the laws of disease?”

“No,” he said, “of course not. We have to take into account, not only the character of Knowledge, but the character of the object known.”

“Quite so, that is my point. You agree then with me that Knowledge may be in various ways good, but that in so far as it is, or may be knowledge of Bad, it cannot be said by itself to constitute the Good.”

“I think,” he agreed, “that I might admit that.”

“Well, then,” I said, “let us leave it there. And now, what has Dennis to say?”

“Ah!” he said, “you unmuzzle me at last. It has really been very hard to sit by in silence and listen to these hérésies without a protest.”

“Hérésies!” retorted Wilson, “if it comes to that, which of us is the heretic?”

“What,” I asked, “is the point of disagreement?”

“It’s a fundamental one. On Wilson’s view, Knowledge is merely the discovery of order among our perceptions. If that were all, I shouldn’t value it much. But on my view, it is the discovery of necessary connection; and in the necessity lies the fascination.”

“But where,” argued Wilson, “do you find your necessity? All that is really given is succession. The necessity is merely what we read into the facts.”

“Not at all! The necessity is ‘given,’ as you call it, as much as anything else, if only you choose to look for it. The type of all Knowledge is mathematical knowledge; and all mathematical knowledge is necessary.”

“But it is all based on assumptions.”

“That may be; but granting the assumptions, it deduces from them necessary consequences. And all true science is of that type. A law of Nature is not a mere description of a routine; it’s a statement that, given such and such conditions, such and such results follow of necessity.”

“Still, you admit that the conditions have to be given! Everything is based ultimately on certain successions and coincidences of which all that can be said is simply that they exist, without any possibility of getting behind them.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, “but at any rate it would be the ideal of Knowledge to establish necessary connections throughout; so that, given any one phenomenon of the universe, all the rest would inevitably follow. And it is only in so far as it progresses towards this consummation that Knowledge is Knowledge at all. A routine simply given without internal coherence is to my mind a contradiction in terms; either the routine is necessary, or it’s not a routine at all, but at best a mere appearance of a routine.”

“I think,” I interposed, “we must leave you and Wilson to fight this out in private. At present, let us assume that your conception of Knowledge is the true one, as we did with his, and examine it from the point of view of the Good. Your conception, then, to begin with, seems to me to be involved in the same defect we have already noted namely, that it may be knowledge of Bad just as much as knowledge of Good. And I suppose you would hardly maintain, any more than Wilson did, that the Good may consist in knowledge of Bad?”

“But,” he objected, “I protest altogether against this notion that there is Knowledge on the one hand and something of which there is knowledge on the other. True Knowledge, if ever we could attain to it, would be a unique kind of activity, in which there would be no distinction, or at least no antagonism, between thinking on the one hand and the thing thought on the other.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “that I quite understand. Have we in fact any knowledge of that kind, that might serve as a kind of type of what you mean?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I think we have. For example, if we are dealing with pure number, as in arithmetic, we have an object which is somehow native to our thought, commensurate with it, or however you like to put it; and it is the same with other abstract notions, such as substance and causation.”

“I see,” I said. “And on the other hand, the element which is alien to thought, and which is the cause of the impurity of most of what we call knowledge, is the element of sense the something given, which thought cannot, as it were, digest, though it may dress and serve it up in its own sauce?”

“Yes,” he said, “that is my idea.”

“So that knowledge, to be perfect, must not be of sense, but only of pure thought, as Plato suggested long ago?”

“Yes.”

“And such a knowledge, if we could attain it, you would call the Good?”

“I think so.”

“Well,” I said, “in the first place, I have to point out that such a Good (if it be one) implies an existence not merely better than that of which we have an experience, but radically and fundamentally different. For our whole life is bathed in sense. Not only are we sunk in it up to the neck, but the greater part of the time our heads are under too, in fact most of us never get them out at all; it is only a few philosophers every now and again who emerge for a moment or two into sun and air, to breathe that element of pure thought which is too fine even for them, except as a rare indulgence. At other times, they too must be content with the grosser atmosphere which is the common sustenance of common men.”

“Well,” he said, “but what of that? We have not been maintaining that the Good is within easy reach of all.”

“No,” cried Ellis. “But even if it were, and were such as you describe it, very few people would care to put out their hands to take it. I, at any rate, for my part can see hardly a vestige of Good in the kind of activity I understand you to mean. It is as though you should say, that Good consists in the perpetual perception that 2 + 2 = 4.”

“But that is an absurd parody. For the point of knowledge would be, that it would be a closed circle of necessary connections. One would move in it, as in infinity, with a motion that is also rest, central at once and peripheral, free and yet bound by law. That is my ideal of a perfect activity!”

“In form, perhaps,” I said, “but surely not in content! For what, in fact, in our experience comes nearest to what you describe? I suppose the movement of a logic like Hegel’s?”

“Yes; only that, of course, is imperfect, full of lapses and flaws!”

“But even if it were perfect,” cried Ellis, “would it be any the better? Imagine being deprived of the whole content of life of nature, of history, of art, of religion, of everything in which we are really interested; imagine being left to turn for ever, like a squirrel in a cage, or rather like the idea of a squirrel in the idea of a cage, round and round the wheel of these hollow notions, without hands, without feet, without anything anywhere by which we could lay hold of a something that is not thought, a something solid, resistant, palpitating, ‘luscious and aplomb,’ as Walt Whitman might say, a sense, a flesh, call it what you will, the unintelligible, but still the indispensable, that which, even if it be bad, we cannot afford to miss, and which, if it be not the Good itself, the Good must somehow include!”

Dennis appeared to be somewhat struck by this way of putting the matter. “But,” he urged, “my difficulty is that if you admit sense, or anything analogous to it, anything at once directly presented and also alien to thought, you get, as you said yourself, something which is unintelligible; and a Good which is not intelligible will be, so far, not good.”

“But,” I said, “what do you mean by intelligible?”

“I think,” he replied, “that I mean two things, both of which must be present. First, that there shall be a necessary connection among the elements presented; and secondly, that the elements themselves should be of such a kind as to be, as it were, transparent to that which apprehends them, so that it asks no questions as to what they are or whence they come, but accepts them naturally and as a matter of course, with the same inevitability as it accepts its own being.”

“And these conditions, you think, are fulfilled by the objects of thought as you defined them?

“I think so.”

“I am not so sure of that,” I said, “it would require a long discussion. But, anyhow, you also seemed to admit, when Ellis pressed you, that thought of that kind could hardly be identified absolutely with Good.”

“I admit,” he replied, “that there are difficulties in that view.”

“But at the same time the Good, whatever it be, ought to be intelligible in the sense you have explained?”

“I should say so.”

“And so should I. But now, the question is, can we not conceive of any other kind of object, which might have, on the one hand, the intelligibility you ascribe to pure ideas, and on the other, that immediate something, ‘luscious and aplomb,’ to borrow Ellis’s quotation, which he desiderated as a constituent of the Good?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “perhaps we might. What is it you have in your mind?”

“Well,” I replied, “let us recur for a moment to works of art. In them we have, to begin with, directly presented elements other than mere ideas.”

“No doubt.”

“And further, these elements, we agreed, have a necessary connection one with the other.”

“Yes, but not logically necessary.”

“No doubt, but still a necessary connection. And it is the necessity of the connection, surely, that is important; the character of the necessity is a secondary consideration.”

“Perhaps.”

“One condition, then, of intelligibility is satisfied by a work of art. But how is it with the other? How is it with the elements themselves? Are they transparent, to use your phrase, to that which apprehends them?”

“Certainly not, for they are mere sense of all things the most obscure and baffling.”

“And yet,” I replied, “not mere sense, for they are sense made beautiful; as beautiful, they are akin to us, and, so far, intelligible.”

“You suggest, then, that Beauty is akin to something in us, in a way analogous to that in which, according to me, ideas are akin to thought?”

“It seems so to me. In so far as a thing is beautiful it does not, I think, demand explanation, but only in so far as it is something else as well.”

“Perhaps. But anyhow, inasmuch as a work of art is also sense, so far at least it is not intelligible.”

“True; and here we come by a new path upon the defect which we noticed before in works of art that their Beauty, or Goodness, is not essential to their whole nature, but is something imposed, as it were, on an alien stuff. And it is this alien element that we now pronounce to be unintelligible.”

“Yes; and so, as we agreed before, we cannot pronounce works of art to be absolutely good.”

“No. But what are we to do then? Where are we to turn? Is there nothing in our experience to suggest the kind of object we seem to want?”

No one answered. I looked round in vain for any help, and then, in a kind of despair, moved by I know not what impulse, I made a direct appeal to Audubon.

“Come!” I cried, “you have said nothing for the last hour! I am sure you must have something to suggest.”

“No,” he said, “I haven’t. Your whole way of dealing with these things is a mystery to me. I can’t conceive, for example, why you have never once referred all through to what I should have thought was the best Good we know if, indeed, we know any Good at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why,” he said, “one’s relations to persons. They’re the only things that I think really worth having if anything were worth having.”

A light suddenly broke on me, and I cried, “Yes! an idea!”

“Well,” said Ellis, “what is it, you man of forlorn hopes?”

“Why,” I said, “suppose the very object we are in search of should be found just there?”

“Where?”

“Why, in persons!”

“Persons!” he repeated. “But what persons? Any, every, all?”

“Wait one moment,” I cried, “and don’t confuse me! Let me approach the matter properly.”

“Very well,” he said, “you shan’t be hurried! You shall have your chance.”

“Let us remind ourselves, then,” I proceeded, “of the point we had reached. The Good, we agreed, so far as we have been able to form a conception of it, must be something immediately presented, and presented in such a way, that it should be directly intelligible intelligible not only in the relations that obtain between its elements, but also in the substance, so to speak, of the elements themselves. Of such intelligibility we had a type, as Dennis maintained, in the objects of pure thought, ideas and their relations. But the Good, we held, could not consist in these. It must be something, we felt, somehow analogous to sense, and yet it could not be sense, for sense did not seem to be intelligible. But now, when Audubon spoke, it occurred to me that perhaps we might find in persons what we want And that is what I should like to examine now.”

“Well,” said Ellis, “proceed.”

“To begin with, then, a person, I suppose we shall agree, is not sense, though he is manifested through sense.”

“What does that mean?” said Wilson.

“It means only, that a person is not his body, although we know him through his body.”

“If he isn’t his body,” said Wilson, “he is probably only a function of it.”

“Oh!” I said, “I know nothing about that. I only know that when we talk of a person, we don’t mean merely his body.”

“No,” said Ellis, “but we certainly mean also his body. Heaven save me from a mere naked soul, ‘ganz ohne Koerper, ganz abstrakt,’ as Heine says.”

“But, at any rate,” I said, “let me ask you, for the moment, to consider the soul apart from the body.”

“The soul,” cried Wilson, “I thought we weren’t to talk about body and soul.”

“Well,” I said, “I didn’t intend to, but I seem to have been driven into it unawares.”

“But what do you mean by the soul?”

“I mean,” I replied, “what I suppose to be the proper object of psychology for even people who object to the word ‘soul’ don’t mind talking (in Greek, of course) of the science of the soul. Anyhow, what I mean is that which thinks and feels and wills.”

“Well, but what about it?” said Ellis.

“The first thing about it is that it is, as it seems to me, of all things the most intelligible.”

“I should have said,” Wilson objected, “that it was of all things the least.”

“Yes; but we are probably thinking of different things. What you have in your mind is the connection of this thing which you refuse to call the soul, with the body, the genesis and relations of its various faculties, the measurement of its response to stimuli, and all the other points which are examined in books of psychology. All that I agree is very unintelligible; I, at least, make no profession of understanding it. But what I meant was, that looking at persons as we know them in ordinary life, or as they are shown to us in literature and art, they really are intelligible to us in the same way that we are intelligible to ourselves.”

“And how is that?”

“Why, through motives and passions. There is, I suppose, no feeling or action of which human beings are capable, from the very highest to the very lowest, which other human beings may not sympathetically understand, through the mere fact that they have the same nature. They will understand more or less according as they have more or less sympathy and insight; but in any case they are capable of understanding, and it is the business of literature and art to make them understand.”

“That is surely a curious use of the word ‘understand.’”

“But it is the one, I think, which is important for us. At any rate, what I mean is that the object presented is so akin, not indeed (as in the case of ideas) merely to our thought, but to our whole complex nature, that it does not demand explanation.”

“What!” cried Audubon. “Well, all I can say is that most of the people I, at any rate, come across do most emphatically demand explanation. I don’t see why they’re there, or what they’re doing, or what they’re for. Their existence Is a perpetual problem to me! And what’s worse, probably my existence is the same to them!”

“But,” I said, “surely if you had leisure or inclination to study them all sympathetically, you would end by understanding them.”

“I don’t think I should. At least I might in a sort of pathological way, as one comes to understand a disease; but I shouldn’t understand why they exist. It seems to me, most people aren’t fit to exist; and I dare say they have the same opinion about me.”

“But are there no people of whose existence you approve?”

“Yes, a few: my friends.”

“Surely,” cried Ellis, “you flatter us! How often have you said that you don’t see why we are this, that, or the other! How often have you complained of our faces, our legs, our arms, in fact, our whole physique, not to mention spiritual blemishes!”

“Well,” he replied, “I don’t deny that it’s a great grief to me to be unable really and objectively to approve of any of my friends. Still

“Still,” I interrupted, “you have given me the suggestion I wanted. For the relation of affection, however imperfect it may be, gives us at least something which perhaps we shall find comes nearer to what we might conceive to be absolutely Good than anything else we have yet hit upon.”

“How so?”

“Well, to begin with, one’s friend appears to one, does he not, as an object good in its own nature, not merely by imposition of our own ideal upon an alien stuff, as we said was the case with works of art?”

“I don’t know about that!” said Audubon. “In my own case, at any rate, I am sure that my friends never see me at all as I really am, but simply read into me their own ideal. They have just as much imposed upon me their own conception, as if I were the marble out of which they had carded a statue.”

“You must allow us to be the judges of that,” I replied.

“Well, but,” he said, “anyhow you can’t deny that such illusions are common. What lover ever saw his mistress as she really is?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t deny that. But at the same time I should affirm that the truer the love, the less the illusion. In what is commonly called love, no doubt, the physical element is the predominant, or even the only one present; and in that case there may be illusion to an indefinite extent. But the love which is based upon years of common experience, which has grown with the growth of the whole person, in power and intelligence and insight, which has survived countless disappointments and surmounted countless obstacles, the love of husband and wife, the love, as we began by saying, of friends such love, as Browning says boldly, ‘is never blind.’ And such love, I suppose you will admit, does exist, however rarely?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Well, then, in the case of such a love, it is the object as it really is, not as it has been falsely fashioned by the imagination, that is directly apprehended as good. And you cannot fairly say that its Good is merely the ideal of the lover transferred to the person of the loved.”

“But,” objected Leslie, “though that may be so, yet still the Good, that Is the person, does inhere in an alien stuff the body.”

“But,” I replied,"is the body alien? Is it not rather an expression of the person? as essential, somehow or other, as the soul?”

“Certainly!” cried Ellis. “Give me the flesh, the flesh!

“’Not with my soul, Love! bid no soul like mine
Lap thee around nor leave the poor sense room!
Take sense too let me love entire and whole
Not with my soul.’”

“I don’t agree with the sentiment of that,” said Leslie, “and anyhow, I don’t see how it bears on the question. For the point of the poem is rather to emphasize than to deny the opposition between body and soul.”

“Yes,” replied Ellis, “but also to suggest what you idealists call the transcending of it.”

“Do you mean that in the marriage relation, for example ...”

“Yes, I mean that in that act the flesh, so to speak, is annihilated at the very moment of its assertion, and what you get is a feeling of total union with the person, body and soul at once, or rather, neither one nor the other, but simply that which is in and through both.”

“I should have thought,” objected Leslie, “it was rather a case of the soul being merged in the body.”

“That depends,” replied Ellis.

“Yes,” I said, “it depends on many things! But what I was thinking of was that, quite apart from that experience, and in the moments of sober observation, one does feel, does one not, a ^correspondence between body and soul, as though the one were the expression of the other?”

“I don’t know,” objected Audubon. “What I feel is much more often a discrepancy.”

“But still,” I urged, “even when there appears to be a discrepancy to begin with, don’t you think that in the course of years the spirit does tend to stamp its own likeness on the flesh, and especially on the features of the face?”

“‘For soul is form,’” quoted Leslie, “‘and doth the body make.’”

“Yes,” I said, “and that verse, I believe, is not merely a beautiful fancy of the poet’s, but rather as the Greeks maintained and on such a point they were good judges a profound and significant truth. At any rate, I find it to be so in the case of the people I care about though there I know Audubon will dissent. In them, every change of expression, every tone of voice, every gesture has its significance; there is nothing that is not expressive not a curl of the hair, not a lift of the eyebrows, not a trick of speech or gait. The body becomes, as it were, transparent and pervious to the soul; and that inexplicable element of sense, which baffles us everywhere else, seems here at last to receive its explanation in presenting itself as the perfect medium of spirit.”

“If you come to that,” cried Ellis, “you might as well extend your remarks to the clothes. For they, to a lover’s eyes, are often as expressive and adorable as the body itself.”

“Well,” I said, “the clothes, too, are a sort of image of the soul, ‘an imitation of an imitation,’ as Plato would say. But, seriously, don’t you agree with me that there is something in the view which regards the body as the ‘word made flesh,’ a direct expression of the person, not a mere stuff in which he Inheres?”

“Yes,” he said, “there may be something in it. At any rate, I understand what you mean.”

“And in so far as that is so,” I continued, “the body, though it be a thing of sense, would nevertheless be directly intelligible in the same way as the soul?”

“Perhaps, in a sort of way.”

“And so we should have In the person loved an object which, though presented to sense, would be at once good and intelligible; and our activity in relation to this object, the activity, that is, of love, would come nearer than any other experience of ours to what we might call a perfect Good?”

“But,” objected Leslie, “it is still far enough from being the Good itself. For after all, say what you may about the body being the medium of the soul, it is still body, still sense, and, like other sensible things, subject to change and decay, and in the end to death. And with the fate of the body, so far as we know, that of the person is involved. So that this, too, like all other Goods of sense, is precarious.’

“Perhaps it is,” I said, “I cannot tell. But all that I mean to maintain at present is that in the activity of love, as we have analysed it, we have something which gives us, if it be only for a moment, yet still in a real experience, an idea, at least, a suggestion, to say no more, of what we might mean by a perfect Good, even though we could not say that it be the Good itself.”

“But what, then, would you call the Good itself?”

“A love, I suppose, which in the first place would be eternal, and in the second all-comprehensive. For there is another defect in love, as we know it, to which you did not refer, namely, that it is a relation only to one or two individuals, while outside and beyond it proceeds the main current of our lives, involving innumerable relations of a very different kind from this.”

“Yes,” cried Ellis, “and that is why this gospel of love, with all its attractiveness, which I admit, seems to me, nevertheless, so trivial and absurd. Just consider! Here is the great round world with all that in it is, infinite in time, infinite in space, infinite in complexity; here is the whole range of human relations, to say nothing of those that are not human, of activities innumerable in and upon nature and man himself, of inventions, discoveries, institutions, laws, arts, sciences, religions; and the meaning and purpose and end of all this we calmly assert to be what? A girl and a boy kissing on the village green!”

“But,” I protested, “who said anything about boys and girls and kisses and village greens?”

“Well, I suppose that is love, of a sort?”

“Yes, of a sort, no doubt; but not a very good one.”

“You are thinking, then, of a special kind of love?”

“I am thinking of the kind which I conceive to be the best.”

“And what is that?”

“One, as I said just now, that should be eternal and all-comprehensive.”

“And so, in the end, you have nothing better than an imaginary heaven to land us in!”

“I have no power, I fear, to land you there. But I believe there is that dwelling within you which will not let you rest in anything short.”

“Then I fear I shall never rest!”

“That may be. But meantime all I want to do is to ascertain, if we can, the meaning of your unrest. I have no interest in what you call an imaginary heaven, except in so far as its conception is necessary to enable us to interpret the world we know.”

“But how should it be necessary? I have never found it so.”

“It is necessary, I think, to explain our dissatisfaction. For the Goods we actually realize always point away from themselves to some other Good whose realization perhaps, as you say, for us is impossible. But even if the Good were chimerical, we cannot deny the passion that pursues it; for it is the same passion that urges us to the pursuit of such Goods as we really can attain. And if we want to understand the nature of that passion, we must understand the nature of its Good, whether it be attainable or no. Only it is for the sake of life here that we need that comprehension, not for the sake of life somewhere else.”

“But do you reduce our passion for Good to this passion for Love?”

“I don’t ‘reduce’ it; I interpret it so.”

“And so we come back to the girl and the boy and the village green!”

“No! we come back to the whole of life, of which that is only an episode. Let me try to explain how the thing presents itself to me.”

“By all means! That is what I want.”

“Very well; I will do my best. Let us look then at life just as it is. Here we find ourselves involved with one another in the most complex relations economic, political, social, domestic, and the rest; and about and in these relations centres the interest of our life, whether it be pleasurable or painful, empty or full, or whatever its character. Among these relations some few perhaps or, it may be, even none realize for a longer or shorter time, with more or less completeness, that ultimate identity in diversity, that ‘me in thee’ which we call love; the rest comprise various degrees of attraction and repulsion, hatred, contempt, indifference, toleration, respect, sympathy, and so on; and all together, always changing, dissolving, and combining anew, weave about us, as they cross and intertwine, the shifting, restless web we call life. Now these relations are an effect and result of the pursuit of Good; but they are never the final goal of that pursuit. The goal, I think, would be a perfect union of all with all; and is not attained by anything that falls short of this, whether the defect be in depth or In extent. And that is how it is that love itself, even in its richer phases, and still more in those which are merely light and sensual, though, as I think, through it alone can we form our truest conception of Good, yet, as we have it, never is the Good, even if it appear to be so for the moment; for those who seek Good, I believe, will never feel that they have found it merely in union with one other person. For what love gains in intension it is apt to lose in extension; so that in practice it may even come to frustrate the very end it seeks, limiting instead of expanding, narrowing just in proportion as it deepens, and, by causing the disruption of all other ties, impoverishing the natures it should have enriched. Or don’t you think that this happens sometimes, for instance in married life?”

“I do indeed.”

“And, on the other hand,” I continued, “it may very well be that one who passes through life without attaining the fruition of love, yet with his gaze always set upon it, in and through many other connections, may yet come closer to the end of his seeking than one who, having known love, has sunk to rest in it then and there, as though he had come already to his journey’s end, when really he has only reached an inn upon the road. So that I am far from thinking, as you pretended to suppose, that the boy and girl on the village green realize then and there the consummation of the world.”

“Still,” he objected, “I do not see, in the scheme you put forward, what place is left for the common business of life for the things which really do, for the most part, occupy and possess men’s minds, and the more, in my opinion, the greater their force and capacity.”

“You mean, I suppose, war and politics, and such things as that?

“Yes, and generally all that one calls business.”

“Well,” I said, “what these things mean to those who pursue them, I am not as competent as you to say. But surely, what they are in essence is just, like most other activities, relations between human beings relations of command and obedience, of respect, admiration, antagonism, comradeship, infinitely complex, infinitely various, but still all of them strung, as it were, upon a single thread of passion; all of them at tension to become something else; all pointing to the consummation which it is the nature of that which created them to seek, and all, in that sense, paradoxical as it may sound, only means to love.”

“You don’t repudiate such activities then?”

“How should I? I repudiate nothing. I am not trying to judge, but, if I could, to explain. It is the men of action, I suppose, who have the greatest extension of life, and sometimes, no doubt, the greatest intension too. But every man has to live his own way, according to his opportunities and capacity. Only, as I think myself, all are involved in the same scheme, and all are driven to the same consummation.”

“A consummation in the clouds!”

“I do not know about that; but at any rate, and this is the important point, that which urges us to it is here and now. Everything is rooted in it. Our pleasures and pains alike, our longing and dissatisfaction, our restlessness never-to-be-quenched, our counting as nothing what has been attained in the pressing on to more, our lying down and rising up, our stumbling and recovering, whether we fail, as we call it, or succeed, whether we act or suffer, whether we hate or love, all that we are, all that we hope to be springs from the passion for Good, and points, if we are right in our analysis, to love as its end.”

Upon this Audubon broke out: “That’s all very well! But the one crucial point you persistently evade. It may be quite true, for aught I know, that the Good you describe is the Good we seek though I am not aware of seeking it myself. But, after all, the real question is, Can we get it? If not, we are mere fools to seek it.”

“So,” I said, “you have brought me to bay at last! And, since you challenge me, I am bound to admit that I don’t know whether we can get it or no.”

“Well then,” he said, impatiently, “what is the good of all this discussion?”

“Clearly,” I replied, “no good at all, if there be no Good, which is the point to which you are always harking back. But you have surely forgotten the basis of our whole argument?”

“What basis?”

“Why, that from the very beginning we have been trying to find out, not so much what we know (for on that point I admit that we know little enough), as what it is necessary for us to believe, if we are to find significance in life.”

“But how can we believe what we don’t know?”

“Why,” I replied, “we can surely adopt postulates, as indeed we always do in practical life. Every man who is about to undertake anything makes the assumption, in the first place, that it is worth doing, and In the second place that it is possible to be done. He may be wrong in both these assumptions, but without them he could not move a step. And so with regard to the business of life, as a whole, it is necessary to assume, if we are to make anything of it at all, both that there is Good, and that we know something about it; and also, I think, that it is somehow or other realizable; but I do not know that any of these assumptions could be proved.”

“But what right have we, then, to make such assumptions?”

“We have none at all, so far as knowledge is concerned. Indeed, to my mind, it is necessary, if we are to be honest with ourselves, that we should never forget that they are assumptions, so long as they have not received definite proof. But still they are, I think, as I said, assumptions we are bound to make, if we are to give any meaning to life. We might perhaps call them ‘postulates of the will’; and our attitude, when we adopt them, that of faith.”

“Faith!” protested Wilson, “that is a dangerous word!”

“It is,” I agreed. “Yet I doubt whether we can dispense with it. Only we must remember that to have ‘faith’ in a proposition is not to affirm that it is true, but to live as we should do if it were. It is, in fact, an attitude of the will, not of the understanding; the attitude of the general going into battle, not of the philosopher in his closet.”

“But,” he objected, “where we do not know, the proper attitude is suspense of mind.”

“In many matters, no doubt,” I replied, “but surely not in those with which we are dealing. For we must live or die; and if we are to choose to do either, we must do so by virtue of some assumption about the Good.”

“But why should we choose to do either? Why should not we simply wait?”

“But wait how? wait affirming or denying? active or passive? Is it possible to wait without adopting an attitude? Is not waiting itself an attitude, an acting on the assumption that it is good to wait?”

“But, at any rate, it does not involve assumptions as large as those which you are trying to make us accept.”

“I am not trying to make you do anything; I am only trying to discover what you make yourself do. And do you, as a matter of fact, really dispute the main conclusions to which we have come, or rather, if you will accept my phrase, the main ‘postulates of the will’ which we have elicited?”

“What are they? Let me have them again.”

“Well,” I said, “here they are. First, that Good has some meaning.”

“Agreed!”

“Second, that we know something about that meaning.”

“Doubtful!” said Dennis. “But it will be no use now to resume that controversy.”

“No,” I replied, “only I thought I had shown that if we know nothing about it, then, for us, it has no meaning; and so our first assumption is also destroyed, and with it all significance in life.”

“Well,” he said, “go on. We can’t go over all that again.”

“Third,” I continued, “that among our experiences the one which comes nearest to Good is that which we called love.”

“Possible!” said Dennis, “but a very tentative approximation.”

“Certainly,” I agreed, “and subject to constant revision.”

“And after that?”

“Well,” I said, “now comes the point Audubon raised. Is it necessary to include also the postulate that Good can be realized?”

“But surely,” objected Wilson, “here at least there is no room for what you call faith. For whether or no the Good can be realized is a question of knowledge.”

“No doubt,” I replied, “and so are all questions if only we could know. But I was assuming that this is one of the things we do not know.”

“But,” he said, “it is one we are always coming to know. Every year we are learning more and more about the course and destiny of mankind.”

“Should you say, then,” I asked, “that we are nearer to knowing whether or no the soul is immortal?”

He looked at me in sheer amazement; and then, “What a question!” he cried. “I should say that we have long known that it isn’t”

“Then,” I said, “if so, we know that the Good cannot be realized.”

“What!” he exclaimed. “I had not understood that your conception of the Good involved the idea of personal immortality.”

“I am almost afraid it does,” I replied, “but I am not quite sure. We have already touched upon the point, if you remember, when we were considering whether we must regard the Good as realizable in ourselves, or only in some generation of people to come. And we thought then that it must somehow be realizable in us.”

“But we did not see at the time what that would involve, though I was afraid all along of something of the kind.”

“Well,” I said, “for fear you should think you have been cheated, we will reconsider the point; and first, if you like, we will suppose that we mean by the Good of some future generation, still retaining for Good the signification we gave to it. The question then of whether or no the Good can be realized, will be the question whether or no it is possible that at some future time all individuals should be knit together in that ultimate relation which we called love.”

“But,” cried Leslie, “the love was to be eternal! So that their souls at least would have to be immortal; and if theirs, why not ours?”

I looked at Wilson; and “Well,” I said, “what are we to say?”

“For my part,” he replied, “I have nothing to say. I consider the whole idea of immortality illegitimate.”

“Yet on that,” I said, “hangs the eternal nature of our Good. But may we retain, perhaps, the all-comprehensiveness?”

“How could we!” cried Leslie, “for it is only the individuals who happened to be alive who could be comprehended so long as they were alive.”

“Another glory shorn from our Good!” I said. “Still, let us hold fast to what we may! Shall we say that if the Good is to be realized the individuals then alive, so long as they are alive, will be bound together in this relation?”

“You can say that if you like,” said Wilson, “and something of that kind I suppose one would envisage as the end. Only I’m not sure that I very well know what you mean by love.”

“Alas!” I cried, “is even that to go? Is nothing at all to be left of my poor conception?”

“You, can say if you like,” he replied, “and I suppose it comes to much the same thing, that all individuals will be related in a perfectly harmonious way.”

“In other words,” cried Ellis, “that you will have a society perfectly definite, heterogeneous, and co-ordinate! ‘There’s glory for you!’ as Humpty Dumpty said.”

“Well,” I said, “this is something very different from what we defined to be Good! But this, at any rate, you think, on grounds of positive science, that it might be possible to realize?”

“Yes,” replied Wilson; “or if not that, I think at any rate that science may ultimately be in a position to decide whether or no it can be realized.”

“But,” I said, “do you not think the same about personal immortality?”

“To be honest,” he replied, “I do not think that the question of personal immortality is one which science ought even to entertain.”

“But,” I urged, “I thought science was beginning to entertain it. Does not the ‘Society for Psychical Research’ deal with such questions?”

“‘The Society for Psychical Research!’” he exclaimed. “I do not call that science.”

“Well,” I said, “at any rate there are men of a scientific turn of mind connected with it” And I mentioned the names of one or two, whereupon Wilson broke out into indignation, declaring with much vehemence that the gentlemen in question were bringing discredit both upon themselves and the University to which they belonged; and then followed a discussion upon the proper objects and methods of science, which I do not exactly recall. Only I remember that Wilson took up a position which led Ellis, with some justice as I thought, to declare that science appeared to be developing all the vices of theology without any of its virtues the dogmatism, the “index expurgatorius,” and the whole machinery for suppressing speculation, without any of the capacity to impose upon the conscience a clear and well-defined scheme of life. This debate, however, was carried on in a tone too polemic to elicit any really fruitful result; and as soon as I was able I endeavoured to steer the conversation back into the smoother waters from which it had been driven.

“Let us admit,” I said, “if you like, for the sake of argument, that on the question of the immortality of the soul we do not and cannot know anything at all.”

“But,” objected Wilson, “I maintain that we do know that there is no foundation at all for the idea. It is a mere reflection of our hopes and fears, or of those of our ancestors.”

“But,” I said, “even if it be, that does not prove that it is not true; it merely shows that we have no sufficient reason for thinking it to be true.”

“Well,” he said, “put it so, if you like; that is enough to relegate the notion to the limbo of centaurs and chimaeras. What we have no reason to suppose to be true, we have no reason to concern ourselves with.”

“Pardon me,” I replied, “but I think we have, if the idea is one that interests us, as Is the case with what we are discussing. We may not know whether or no it is true, but we cannot help profoundly caring.”

“Well,” he said, “I may be peculiarly constituted, but, honestly, I do not myself care in the least”

“But,” I said, “perhaps you ought to, if you care about the Good; and that is really the question I want to come back to. What is the minimum we must believe if we are to make life significant? Is it sufficient to believe in what you call the ‘progress of the race’? Or must we also believe in the progress of the individual, involving, as it does, personal immortality?”

“Well,” said Wilson, “I don’t profess to take lofty views of life that I leave to the philosophers. But I must say it seems to me to be a finer thing to work for a future in which one knows one will not participate oneself than for one in which one’s personal happiness is involved. I have always sympathized with Comte, pedant as he was, in the remark he made when he was dying.”

“Which one?” interrupted Ellis. “‘Quelle perte irreparable?’ That always struck me as the most humorous thing ever said.”

“No,” said Wilson, gravely, “but when he said that the prospect of death would be to him infinitely less sublime, if it did not involve his own extinction; the notion being, I suppose, that death is the triumphant affirmation of the supremacy of the race over the individual. And that, I think myself, is the sound and healthy and manly view.”

“My dear Wilson,” cried Ellis, “you talk of lofty views; but this is a pinnacle of loftiness to which I, for one, could never aspire. Positively, to rejoice in the extinction of the individual with his faculties undeveloped, his opportunities unrealized, his ambitions unfulfilled why it’s sublime! its Kiplingese there’s no other word for it! Shake hands, Wilson! you’re a hero.”

“Really,” said Wilson, rather impatiently, “I see nothing strained or high-faluting in the view. And as to what you say about faculties undeveloped and the rest, that seems to me unreal and exaggerated! Most men have a good enough time, and get pretty much what they deserve. A healthy, normal man is ready to die he has done what he had it in him to do, and passed on his work to the next generation.”

“I have often wondered,” said Ellis, meditatively, “what ‘normal’ means. Does it mean one in a million, should you say? Or perhaps that is too large a proportion? Some people say, do they not, that there never was a normal man?”

“By ‘normal,’” retorted Wilson, doggedly, “I mean average, and I include every one except a few decadents and faddists.”

At this point, seeing that we were threatened with another digression, I thought it best to intervene again.

“We are diverging,” I said, “a little from the issue. Wilson’s position, as I understand him, is that the prospect of the future Good of the race is sufficient to give significance to the life of the individual, even though he realize no Good for himself.”

“No,” replied Wilson, “I don’t say that; for I think he always does realize sufficient Good for himself.”

“But is it because of that Good which he realizes for himself that his life has significance? Or because of the future Good of the race?”

“I don’t know; both, I suppose.”

“You do not think then that the future Good of the race is sufficient, by itself, to give significance to the lives of individuals who are never to partake in it?”

“I don’t like that way of putting the question. What I believe is, that in realizing his own Good a man is also contributing to that of the race. There is no such antagonism between the two ends as you seem to suggest.”

“I don’t say that there is an antagonism; but I do insist that there is a distinction. And I cannot help feeling and this is where we seem to disagree that in estimating the Good of individual lives we must have regard to that which they realize in and for themselves, not merely to that which they may be contributing to produce some day in somebody else.”

“These ‘somebody elses,’” cried Ellis, “being after all nothing but other individuals like themselves! so that you get an infinite series of people doing Good to one another, and none of them getting any Good for themselves, like the: islanders who lived by taking in one another’s washing!”

“Well, but,” said Wilson, “supposing I consent, for the sake of argument, to let you estimate the worth of life by the Good which individuals realize in themselves. What follows then?”

“Why, then” I said, “it would, I think, be very hard to maintain that we do most of us realize Good enough to make it seem worth while to have lived at all, if indeed we are simply extinguished at death. At any rate, if we set aside an exceptional few, and look frankly at the mass of men and women, judging them not as means to something else, but as ends in themselves, with reference not to happiness, or content, or acquiescence, or indifference, but simply to Good if we look at them so, can we honestly say that there is enough significance in their lives to justify the labour and expense of producing and maintaining them?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, “they probably think themselves that there is.”

“Probably,” I rejoined, “they do not think about it at all. But what I should like to know is, what do you think?”

“I don’t see,” he objected, “how I can have any opinion; the problem is too vast and indeterminate.”

“Is it?” cried Audubon, intervening in his curious abrupt way, and with more than his usual energy of protest “Well, indeterminate or no, it’s the one point on which I have no doubt. Most people are only fit to have their necks broken, and it would be the kindest thing for them if some one would do it.”

“Well,” I said, “at any rate that is a vigorous opinion. Does anyone else share it?”

“I do,” said Leslie, “on the whole. Most men, if they are not actually bad, are at best indifferent sacs merely, floating with open mouths for food to slip in.’”

“Upon my word!” cried Bartlett, “it’s wonderful how much you know about them, considering how very little you’ve seen of them!”

“Oh!” I said, turning to him, “then you do not agree with this estimate?”

“I!” he said. “Oh, no! I am not a superior person! Most men, I suppose, are as good as we are, and probably a great deal better!”

“They might well be that,” I replied, “without being particularly good. But perhaps, as you seem to suggest, it might be better to confine ourselves to our own experience and consider whether for ourselves, so far as we can see, we should think life much worth having, supposing death to be the end of it all.”

“Oh, as to that, of course I should, for my part,” cried Ellis, “and so, I hope, should we all. In fact, I consider it rather monstrous to ask the question at all.”

“My dear Ellis,” I protested, “you are really the most inconsistent of men! Not a minute ago you were laughing at Wilson for his acquiescence in the extinction of the individual ’with his opportunities unrealized, his faculties undeveloped,’ and all the rest of it. And now you appear to be adopting precisely the same attitude yourself.”

“I can’t help it,” he replied; “consistent or no, life’s good enough for me. And so it should be for you, you ungrateful ruffian!”

“I am not so sure,” I said, “that it should be; not so sure as I was a few years ago.”

“Why, you Methuselah, what has age got to do with it?”

“Just this,” I replied, “that up to a certain time of life all the Good that we get we take to be prophetic of more Good to come. What we actually realize we value less for itself than for something else which it promises. The moments of good experience we expand till they fill all infinity; the intervening tracts of indifferent or bad we simply forget or ignore. Life is good, we say, because the universe is good; and this goodness we expect to grasp in its entirety, not to-day, perhaps, nor to-morrow, but at least the day after. And so, like the proverbial ass, we are lured on by a wisp of hay. But being, at bottom, intelligent brutes, we begin, in time, to reflect; we put back our ears, and plant our feet stiff and rigid where we stand, and refuse to budge an inch till we have some further information as to the meaning of the journey into which we are being enticed. That, at least, is the point that has been reached by this ass who is now addressing you. I want to know something more about that bundle of hay; and that is why I am interested in the question of personal immortality.”

“Which means to drop the metaphor ?”

“Which means, that I have come to realize that I am not likely to get more Good out of life than I have already had, and that I may very likely get less; or if more in some respects, then less in others. For, in the first place, the world, as it seems, is just as much bad as good, and whether Good or Bad predominate I cannot say. And in the second place, even of what Good there is and I do not under-estimate its worth it is but an infinitesimal portion that I am capable of realizing, so limited am I by temperament and circumstance, so bound by the errors and illusions of the past, so hampered by the disabilities crowding in from the future. For though, as I think, the older I get the more clearly I recognize what is good, and the more I learn to value and to perceive it, yet at the same time the less do I become capable of making it my own, and must in the nature of things become less and less so, in so far at least as Goods other than those of the intellect are concerned. And this is a position which seems to be involved in the mere fact of age and death frankly seen from the naturalistic point of view; and so it has always been felt and expressed from the time of the Greeks onwards, and not least effectively, perhaps, by Browning in his ’Cleon’ you remember the passage:

“’... Every day my sense of joy Grows more acute, my soul (intensified By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; While every day my hairs fall more and more, My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase The horror quickening still from year to year, The consummation coming past escape, When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy When all my works wherein I prove my worth, Being present still to mock me in men’s mouths, Alive still in the phrase of such as thou, I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man, The man who loved his life so over-much, Shall sleep in my urn.’

“You see the point; indeed, it is so familiar, I have laboured it, perhaps, too much. But the result seems to be, that while it is natural enough that in youth, for those who are capable of Good, life should seem to be pre-eminently worth the having, yet the last judgment of age, for those who believe that death is the end, will be a doubt, and perhaps more than a doubt, even in the case of those most favoured by fortune, whether after all a life has been worth the trouble of living which has unfolded such infinite promise only to bury it fruitless in the grave.”

“I think that’s rather a morbid view!” said Parry.

“I do not know,” I said, “whether it is morbid, nor do I very much care; the question is, whether it is reasonable, and whether it is not the position naturally and perhaps inevitably adopted not by the worst but by the best men among those who have abandoned the belief in personal immortality.”

“That,” interposed Wilson, “is surely not the case. One knows of people who, though they have no belief in survival after death, yet maintain a perfectly cheerful and healthy attitude towards life. Harriet Martineau is one that occurs to me. To her, you may remember, life appeared not less but more worth living when she had become convinced of her own annihilation at death; and she awaited with perfect equanimity and calm its imminent approach, not as a deliverance from a condition which was daily becoming more intolerable, but as a fitting crown and consummation to a career of untiring and fruitful activity.”

“That,” exclaimed Parry with enthusiasm, “is what I call magnanimous!”

“I don’t!” retorted Leslie, “I call it simply stupid and unimaginative.”

“Call it what you like,” said Wilson; “anyhow it is a position which can be and has been adopted.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but one which, I think, a clearer analysis of the facts, a franker survey and a more penetrating insight, would make it increasingly difficult to sustain. And after all, an estimate which is to endure must be not only magnanimous but reasonable.”

“But to her, and to others like her, it did and does appear to be reasonable. And you ought to admit, I think, that there are cases in which life is well worth living quite apart from the hypothesis of personal immortality.”

“I am ready to admit,” I replied, “that there are people to whom it seems to be so, but I doubt whether they are very numerous, among those, I mean, who have reflected on the subject, and whose opinions alone we need consider. I, at any rate, have commonly found in talking to people about death supposing, which is unusual, that they are willing to talk about it at all that they adopt one of two views, either of which presupposes the worthlessness of life, if life, as we know it, be indeed all”

“What views do you mean?”

“Why, either they believe that death means annihilation, and rejoice in the prospect as a deliverance from an intolerable evil; or they hold that there is a life beyond, and that they will find there the reason and justification for existence which they have never been able to discover here.”

“You forget, surely,” said Wilson, “a third point of view, which I should have thought was as common as either of the others, that of those who believe in a life after death, but look forward to it with inexpressible fear of the possible evils which it may contain.”

“True,” I said, “but such fear, I suppose, is a reflex of actual experience, and implies, does it not, a vivid sense of the evils of existence as we know it? So that these people, too, I should maintain, have not really found life satisfactory, or they would look forward with hope rather than fear to the possibility of Its continuance.”

“But in their case, at any rate, the hypothesis of personal immortality is an aggravation, not a remedy, of the evil.”

“No doubt; but I have been assuming throughout that the hypothesis involves the realization of that Good which, without it, we recognize to be unattainable; and it is only in that sense, and from that point of view, that I have introduced it.”

“Well,” he persisted, “considering how improbable the hypothesis is, I should be very loth to admit that it is one which it is practically necessary to adopt. And I still maintain that most people do not require it ordinary simple people, I mean, who do their work and make no fuss about it.”

“Perhaps not,” I replied, “for it is characteristic of such people to make no hypothesis at all, but to adopt for the moment any view suggested by the state of their spirits. But I believe that if ever you can get a man, no matter how plain and unsophisticated, to reflect fairly upon his own experience, and to look impartially at the facts all round, abstracting from all bias of habit and mood and prejudice, he will admit that if it be true that the individual is extinguished at death, together with all his possibilities of realizing Good, then life cannot rationally be judged to be worth the living, however imperatively we may be compelled to continue to live it.”

“But it Is just that imperative compulsion,” cried Parry, “on which I rely! That seems to me the justification of life the fact that we are forced to live! I trust that instinct more than all the inclination in the world!”

“But,” I said, “when you say that you trust the instinct, do you mean that you judge it to be good?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Then in trusting the instinct you are really trusting your reason, which judges the instinct to be good, or, if not your reason, the faculty, whatever it be, which judges of Good. And the only difference between us is, that I try to ascertain what we do really believe to be good, whereas you accept and cling to a particular judgment about Good, without any attempt to test it and harmonize it with others.”

“But you admit yourself that all your results are tentative and problematical in the extreme.”

“Certainly.”

“And yet these results you venture to set in opposition to a simple, profound, imperative cry of Nature!”

“Why should I not? For I have no right to suppose that nature is good, except in so far as I can reasonably judge her to be so.”

“That seems to me a sort of blasphemy.”

“I am afraid,” I said, “if I must choose, I would rather blaspheme Nature than Reason. But I hope I am not blaspheming either. For it may be that what you call Nature has provided for the realization of Good. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis I was suggesting; and it is you who appear to be setting it aside.”

“But,” objected Wilson, “you talk of this hypothesis as if it were something one could really entertain! To me it is not a hypothesis at all; it’s simply an inconceivability.”

“Do you mean that it is self-contradictory?”

“No, not exactly that. Simply that it is unimaginable.”

“Oh!” I said; “but what one can imagine depends on the quality of one’s imagination! To me, for example, the immortality of the soul does not seem any harder to imagine than birth and life, and death and consciousness. It’s all such a mystery together, if once one begins trying to realize it.”

“No one,” interposed Ellis, “has put that point better than Walt Whitman.”

“True,” I replied, “and that reminds me that I think you hardly did justice to his view when you were quoting him a little while ago. It is true that he does, as you said, accept all facts, good and bad, and even appears at times to obliterate the distinction between them. But also, whether consistently or no, he regards them all as phases of a process, good only because of what they promise to be. So that his view really requires a belief in immortality to justify it; and to him such belief is as natural and simple as to Wilson it is absurd. There is a passage somewhere, I remember perhaps you can quote it it begins, ‘Is it wonderful that I should be immortal?’”

“Yes,” he said, “I remember”:

“Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is
immortal;

“I know it is wonderful but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and
how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful,

“And passed from a babe, in the creeping trance of a couple of
summers and winters to articulate and walk. All this is equally
wonderful.

“And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other
without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other,
is every bit as wonderful.

“And that I can think such thoughts as these is just as wonderful,

“And that I can remind you, and you think them and know them to be
true, is just as wonderful.

“And that the moon spins round the earth, and on with the earth, is
equally wonderful,

“And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is equally
wonderful.”

“That,” I said, “is the passage I meant, and it shows that Whitman, at any rate, did not share Wilson’s feeling that the immortality of the soul is unimaginable.”

“Well,” said Wilson, “imaginable or no, we have no reason to believe it to be true.”

“No reason, indeed,” I agreed, “so far as demonstration is concerned, though equally, as I think, no reason to deny it. But the point I raised was, whether, if we are to take a positive view of life and hold that it somehow has a good significance, we are not bound to adopt this, hypothesis of immortality to believe, that is, that, somehow or other, there awaits us a state of being in which all souls shall be bound together in that harmonious and perfect relation of which we have a type and foretaste in what we call love. For, if it be true that perfect Good does involve some such relation, and yet that it is one unattainable under the conditions of our present life, then we must say either that such Good is unattainable and in that case why should we idly pursue it? or that we believe we shall attain it under some other conditions of existence. And according as we adopt one or the other position so it seems to me our attitude towards life will be one of affirmation or of negation.”

“But,” he objected, “even if you were right in your conception of Good, and even if it be true that Good in its perfection is unattainable, yet we might still choose to get at least what Good we can and some Good you admit we can get and might find in that pursuit a sufficient justification for life.”

“We might, indeed,” I admitted, “but also we might very well find, that the Good we can attain is so small, and the Evil so immensely preponderant, that we ought to labour rather to bring to an end an existence so pitiful than to perpetuate it indefinitely in the persons of our luckless descendants.”

“That, thank heaven,” said Parry, “is not the view which is taken by the Western world.”

“The West” I replied, “has not yet learned to reflect. Its activity is the slave of instinct, blind and irresponsible.”

“Yes,” he assented eagerly, “and that is its saving grace! This instinct, which you call blind, is health and sanity and vigour.”

“I know,” I said, “that you think so, and so does Mr. Kipling, and all the train of violent and bloody bards who follow the camp of the modern army of progress. I have no quarrel with you or with them; you may very well be right in your somewhat savage worship of activity. I am only trying to ascertain the conditions of your being right, and I seem to find it in personal immortality.”

“No,” he persisted. “We are right without condition, right absolutely and beyond all argument. Pursue Good is the one ultimate law; whether or no it can be attained is a minor matter; and if to inquire into the conditions of its attainment is only to weaken us in the pursuit, then I say the inquiry is wrong, and ought to be discouraged.”

“Well” I said, “I will not dispute with you further. Whether you are right or wrong I cannot but admire your strenuous belief in Good and in our obligation to pursue it. And that, after all, was my main point. On the other question about what Good is and whether it is attainable, I could hardly wish to make converts, so conscious am I that I have infinitely more to learn than to teach. Only, that there is really something to learn, of that I am profoundly convinced. Perhaps even Audubon will agree with me there?”

“I don’t know that I do,” he replied, “and anyhow it doesn’t seem to me to make much difference. Whatever we may think about Good, that doesn’t affect the nature of Reality and Reality, I believe, is bad!”

“Ah, Reality!” I rejoined, “but what is Reality? Is it just what we see and touch and handle?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“That is a sober view, and one which I have constantly tried to impress upon myself. Sometimes, even, I think I have succeeded, under the combined stress of logic and experience. But there comes an unguarded moment, some evening in summer, like this, when I am walking, perhaps, alone in a solitary wood, or in a meadow beside a quiet stream; and suddenly all my work is undone, and I am overwhelmed by a direct apprehension, or what seems at least for the moment to be such, that everything I hear and see and touch is mere illusion after all, and behind it lies the true Reality, if only I could find the way to seize it. It is due, I suppose, to some native and ineradicable strain of mysticism; or perhaps, as I sometimes think, to the memory of a strange experience which I once underwent and have never been able to forget”

“What was that?”

“It will not be very easy, I fear, to describe, but perhaps it may be worth while to make the attempt, for it bears, more or less, on the subject of our conversation. Once then, you must know, and once only, a good many years ago now, I was put under the influence of anaesthetics; and during the time I was unconscious, or rather, conscious in a new way, I had a very curious dream, if dream it were, which has never ceased to affect my thoughts and my life. It was as follows:

“As soon as I lost consciousness of the world without, my soul, I thought, which seemed at first to be diffused throughout my body, began to draw itself upward, beginning at the feet. It passed through the veins of the legs and belly to the heart, which was beating like a thousand drums, and thence by the aorta and the carotids to the brain, whence it emerged by the fissures of the skull into the outer air. No sooner was it free (though still attached, as I felt with some uneasiness, by a thin elastic cord to the pia mater) than it gathered itself together (into what form I could not say), and with incredible speed shot upwards, till it reached what seemed to be the floor of heaven. Through this it passed, I know not how, and found itself all at once in a new world.

“What this world was like I must now endeavour to explain, difficult though it be to find suitable language; for the things here, of which our words are symbols, are themselves only symbols of the things there. The feeling I had, however, (for I was now identified with my soul, and had forgotten all about my body) the feeling I had was that of sitting alone beside a river. What kind of country it was I can hardly describe, for there was nowhere any definite colour or form, only a suggestion, such as I have seen in drawings, of vast infinite tracts of empty space. I could not even say there was light or darkness, for my organ of perception did not seem to be the eye; only I was aware of an emotional effect similar to that of twilight, cold, grey, and formless as night itself. The silence was absolute, if indeed silence it were, for it was not by the ear that I perceived either sound or its absence; but something there was, analogous to silence in its effect And in the midst of the silence and the twilight (since so I must call them) flowed the river, or what seemed such, distinguishable, as I thought at first, rather by the fact that it flowed, than by any peculiarity of substance, colour, or form, from the stretches of empty space that formed its banks. But presently, as I looked more closely, I saw, rising from its surface, dipping, rising, and dipping again, in a regular rhythm, without change or pause, what I can only compare to a shoal of flying fish. Not that they looked like fish, or indeed like anything I had ever seen, but that was the image suggested by their motion. As soon as I saw them I knew what they were: they were souls; and the river down which they passed was the river of Time; and their dipping in and out again was the sequence of their lives and deaths.

“All this did not surprise me at all. Rather, I felt it was something I had always known, yet something inexpressibly flat and disillusioning. ‘Of course!’ I said to myself, or thought, or whatever may have been my mode of cognition ’Of course! That is it, and that is all! Souls are indeed immortal why should we ever have imagined otherwise? They are immortal, and what of it? I see the death-side now as I saw the life-side then; and one has as little meaning as the other. As it has been, so it will be, now, henceforth, and for ever, in and out, in and out, without pause or stint, futile, trivial, silly, stale, tedious, monotonous, and vain!’ The long pre-occupation of men with religion, philosophy, and art, seemed to me now as incomprehensible as it was ridiculous. There was nothing after all to be interested about! There was simply this! The dreariness of my mood was indescribable, and corresponded so closely to the scene before me that I found myself wondering which was effect, which cause. The silence, the tracts of unformed space, the unsubstantial river, the ceaseless vibration along its surface of infinite moving points, all this was a reflex of my thoughts and they of it. My misery was Intolerable; to escape became my only object; and with this in view I rose and began to move, I knew not whither, along the silent shore.

“As I went, I presently became aware of what looked like high towers standing along the margin of the stream. I say they looked like towers, but I should rather have said they symbolized them; for they had no specific shape, round or square, nor any definite substance or dimensions. They suggested rather, if I may say so, the idea of verticality; and otherwise were as blank and void of form or colour as everything else in this strange land. I made my way towards them along the bank; and when I had come close under the first, I saw that there was a door in it, and written over the door, in a language I cannot now recall, but which then I knew that I had always known, an inscription whose sense was:

“‘I am the Eye; come into me and see.’

“Miserable as I was, it was impossible that I should hesitate; I did not know, it is true, what might await me within, but it could not be worse and might well be better than my present plight. The door was open; I stepped in; and no sooner had I crossed the threshold than I was aware of an experience more extraordinary and delightful than it had ever been my lot to encounter. I had the sensation of seeing light for the first time! For hitherto, as I have tried to explain, though it has been necessary to speak in terms of sight, I have done so only by a metaphor, and it was not really by vision that I became acquainted with the scene I have described. But now I saw, and saw pure light! And yet not only saw, but, as I thought apprehended it with the other senses, both with those we know and with others of which we have not yet dreamt. I heard light, I tasted and touched it, it enveloped and embraced me; I swam in it as in an element, wafted and washed and luxuriantly lapped. Pure light, and nothing else! No objects, at first! It was only by degrees, and as the first intoxication subsided, that I began to be aware of anything but the medium itself. I saw then that I was standing at what seemed to be a window, looking out over the scene I had just left But how changed it was! The river now, like a blue and golden snake, ran through a sunny champaign bright with flowers; above it hung a cloudless summer sky; and the happy souls went leaping in and out like dolphins on a calm day in the Mediterranean. On all this I gazed with inexpressible delight; but as I looked an extraordinary thing occurred. The flowery plain before me seemed to globe itself into a sphere; the blue river clasped it like a girdle; for a moment it hung before me like a star, then opened out and split into a thousand more, and these again into others and yet others, till a whole heaven of stars was revolving about me in the most wonderful dance-measure you can conceive, infinitely complex, but never for a moment confused, for the stars were of various colours, more beautiful far than any of ours, and by these, as they crossed and intertwined in exquisite harmonies, the threads of the intricate figure were kept distinct.

“What I was looking upon, I knew, was the same heaven that our astronomers describe; only I was privileged actually to perceive the movements they can only infer and predict. For here on earth our faculties are proportioned to our needs, and our apprehension of time and change is measured by units too small for us to be able to embrace by sense the large and spacious circuits of the stars. But I, in my then condition, had powers commensurate with all existence; so that not only could I follow with the eye the coils of that celestial morrice, but in each one of the whirling orbs, as they approached or receded in the dance, I could trace, so far as I was minded, the course of its secular history; whole series of changes and transformations such as we laboriously infer, from fossils and rocks and hard unmalleable things, being there (as though petrifaction were reversed and solidest things made fluid) unrolled before me, molten and glowing and swift, in a stream of torrential evolution whose moments were centuries. Wonderful it was, and strange, to see the first trembling film creep like a mantle over a globe of fire, shiver, and break, and form again, and gradually harden and cohere, now crushed into ridges and pits, now extended into plains, and tossing the hissing seas from bed to bed, as the levels of the viscous surface rose and fell. Wonderful, too, when the crust was formed and life became possible, how everywhere, in wet or dry, hot or cold alike, wherever footing could be found, came up and flourished and decayed things that root and things that move, winged or finned or legged, creeping, flying, running, breeding, in mud or sand, in jungle, forest, and marsh, pursuing and pursued, devouring and devoured, pairing, contending, killing, things huge beyond belief, mammoth and icthyosaurus, things minute and numerous past the power of calculation, coming and going as they could find space, species succeeding to species, and crowding every point and vantage for life on the heaving tumultuous bosom of eddying worlds.

“Wonderful it was, but terrible, too; for what struck me with a kind of chill, even while I was wrapt in admiration, was the fact that though everything was in constant change, and in the change there was clearly an order and routine, yet I could not detect anything that seemed like purpose. Direction there was, but not direction to an end; for the end was no better than the beginning, it was only different; the idea of Good, in short, did not apply. And this fact, which was striking enough in the case of the phenomena I have described, made itself felt with even more insistence when I turned to consider the course of human history. For that too I saw unrolled before me, not only on our own, but on innumerable other worlds, in various phases and in various forms, both those which we know, and others of which we have no conception, and which I am now quite unable to recall. Men I saw housing in caves, or on piles in swamps and lakes, dwellers in wagons and tents, hunters, or shepherds under the stars, men of the mountain, men of the plain, of the river-valley and the coast, nomad tribes, village tribes, cities, kingdoms, empires, wars and peace, politics, laws, manners, arts and sciences. Yet in all this, so far as I could observe, although, through all vacillations, there appeared to be a steady trend in a definite direction, there was nothing to indicate what we call purpose. Men, I saw, had ideas about Good, but these ideas of theirs, though they were part of the efficient causes of events, were in no sense the explanation of the process. There was no explanation, for there was no final cause, no purpose, end, or justification at all. Man, like nature, was the plaything of a blind fate. The idea of Good had no application.

“The horror I felt as this truth (for so I thought it) was borne in upon me was proportioned to my previous delight. I had now but one desire, to escape, even though it were only back to what I had left. And as the Angel-Boys in ‘Faust’ cry out to Pater Seraphicus for release, when they can no longer bear the sights they see through his eyes, so I, in my anguish, cried, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ And instantly I found myself standing again at the foot of the tower, in that land of twilight, silence, and infinite space, with the souls going down the river, in and out, in and out, futile, trivial, tedious, monotonous, and vain. Looking up, I saw written over the door from which I had emerged, and which was opposite to that by which I had entered, words whose sense was:

“‘Eye hath not seen.’

“I walked round the Tower, and found a third door facing the river; and over that was written:

“‘Turris scientiae.’

“But all these doors were now closed; nor indeed, had they been open, should I have felt any inclination to renew the experience from which I had escaped. I therefore turned away sadly enough and made my way along the bank towards the second tower.

“Over the door of this was written in the same language as before:

“‘I am the Ear; come into me and hear.’

“The door was open, and I went in, this time with some apprehension, but with still more curiosity and hope. No sooner was I within than I was overwhelmed by an experience analogous to that which had greeted me in the Tower of Sight, but even more ravishingly sweet. This time what I felt was the sensation of pure sound: sound, not merely heard, but, as before in the case of light, apprehended at once by every avenue of sense, and folding and sustaining, as it seemed, my whole being in a clear and buoyant element of tone. It was only by degrees that out of this absolute essence of sheer sound distinctions of rhythm and pitch began to appear, and to assume definite musical form. The theme at first was pastoral and sweet, suggestive of rustling grasses and murmuring reeds, interwoven with which was an exquisite lilting tune, the song of the souls as they sped down the river. But one by one other elements crept into the strain; it increased in volume and variety of tone, in complexity of rhythm and tune, till it grew at length into a symphony so august, so solemn, and so profound, that there is nothing I know of in our music here to which I can fitly compare it. It reminded me, however, of Wagner more than of any other composer, in the richness of its colour, the insistence and force of its rhythms, its fragments of ineffable melody, and above all, its endless chromatic sequences, for ever suggesting but never actually reaching the full close which I knew not whether most to dread or to desire. The music itself was wonderful enough; but more wonderful still was my clear perception, while I listened, that what was being presented to me now through the medium of sound was precisely the same world which I had seen from the Tower of Sight. Every phenomenon, and sequence of phenomena, which I had witnessed there, I recognized now, in appropriate musical form. The foundation of all was a great basal rhythm, given out on something that throbbed like drums, terrible in its persistence and yet beautiful too; and this, I knew, represented the mechanical basis of the world, the processes which science knows as ‘laws of motion’ and the like, but which really, as I then perceived, might more aptly be described as the more inveterate of Nature’s habits. Upon this foundation, which varied, indeed, but by almost imperceptible gradations, was built up an infinitely complex structure of intermediate parts, increasing from below upwards in freedom, ease and beauty of form, till high above all floated on the ear snatches of melody, haunting, poignant, meltingly tender, or, as it might be, martial and gay exquisite in themselves, yet never complete, fragments rather, as it seemed, of some theme yet to come, which they had hardly time to suggest before they were torn, as it were, from their roots and sent drifting down the stream, to reappear in new settings, richer combinations, and fairer forms; and these, I knew, were symbols of the lives and deaths of conscious beings.

“As this character of the music and its representative meaning grew gradually clearer to me, there began to mingle with my delight a certain feeling of anguish. For while, on the one hand, I passionately desired to hear given out in full the theme which as yet had been only suggested in fragmentary hints, on the other, I knew that with its appearance the music would come to a close, just at the moment when its cessation would involve the keenest revulsion of feeling. And this moment, I felt, was rapidly approaching. The rhythm grew more and more rapid, the instruments scaled higher and higher, the tension of chromatic progressions was strained to what seemed breaking point, till suddenly, with an effect as though a stream, long pent in a gorge, had escaped with a burst into broad sunny meadows, the whole symphony broke away into the major key, and high and clear, chanted, as it seemed, on ten thousand trumpets, silver, aethereal, and exquisitely sweet for all their resonant clangour, I heard the ultimate melody of things. For a moment only; for, as I had foreseen, with the emergence of that air, the music came abruptly to a close; and I found myself sitting bathed in tears at the door of the tower on the opposite side to that by which I had entered; and there once more was the land of silence, twilight, and infinite space, with the souls going down the river, in and out, in and out, futile, trivial, tedious, monotonous and vain!

“As soon as I had recovered myself, I looked up and saw written over the door the inscription:

“‘Ear hath not heard.’

“And going round to the side facing the river, I saw there inscribed:

“‘Turris Artis?’

“Whereupon, full of perplexity, I made my way down towards the third tower, reflecting, as I went; in a curious passion at once of hope and fear, ’Neither this, then, nor that, neither Eye nor Ear, has given me what I sought. Each is a symbol; but this, as it seems, a more perfect symbol than that; for it, at least, is Beauty, and the other was only Power. But is there, then, nothing but symbols? Or shall I, in one of these towers, shall I perhaps find the thing that is symbolized?’

“By this time I had reached the third tower, and over the door facing me I saw written:

“‘I am the Heart; come into me and feel.’

“I entered without hesitation, and this time I was met by an experience even stranger and more delightful than before, but also, I fear, more indescribable. At first, I was aware of nothing but a pure feeling, which was not of any particular sense, (as, before, of sight and hearing,) but was rather, I think, the general feeling of Life itself, the kind of diffused sensation of well-being one has in health, underlying all particular activities. In this sensation I seemed, as before, to be lapped, as in an element; but this time the feeling did not pass. On the contrary, I found, when I came to myself, that I actually was in the river, leaping along with the other souls in such an ecstasy of physical delight as I have never felt before or since. Such, at least, was my first impression; but gradually it changed into something which I despair of rendering in words, for indeed I can hardly render it in my own thoughts. Conceive, however, that as, according to the teaching of science, every part of matter is affected by every other, insomuch that, as they say, the fall of an apple disturbs the balance of the universe; so, in my experience then, (and this, I believe, is really true) all souls were intimately connected by spiritual ties. Nothing that happened in one but was somehow or other, more or less obscurely, reflected in the rest, so that all were so closely involved and embraced in a network of fine relations that they formed what may be compared to a planetary system, sustained in their various orbits by force of attraction and repulsion, distinguished into greater and lesser constellations, and fulfilling in due proportion their periods and paths under the control of spiritual laws. Of this system I was myself a member; about me were grouped some of my dearest friends; and beyond and around stretched away, like infinite points of light, in a clear heaven of passion, the world of souls. I speak, of course, in a figure, for what I am describing in terms of space, I apprehended through the medium of feeling; and by ‘feeling’ I mean all degrees of affection, from extreme of love to extreme of hate. For hate there was, as well as love, the one representing repulsion, the other attraction; and by their joint influence the whole system was sustained. It was not, however, in equilibrium; at least, not in stable equilibrium. There was a trend, as I soon became aware, towards a centre. The energy of love was constantly striving to annihilate distance and unite in a single sphere the scattered units that were only kept apart by the energy of hate. This effort I felt proceeding in every particular group, and, more faintly, from one group to another: I felt it with an intensity at once of pain and of rapture, such as I cannot now even imagine, much less describe; and most of all did I feel it within the limits of my own group, of which some of those now present were members. But within this group in particular I was aware of an extraordinary resistance. One of its members, I thought, (I mention no names,) steadily refused either to form a closer union with the rest of us, or to enter into more intimate relations with other groups. This resistance I felt in the form of an indescribable tension, a tension which grew more and more acute, till suddenly the whole system seemed to collapse, and I found myself in darkness and alone, being dragged down, down, by the cord which attached me to my body. At the same time there was a roaring in my ears, and I saw my body, as I thought, like a fearful wild beast with open jaws; it swallowed me down, and I awoke with a shock to find myself in the operator’s room, with a voice in my ears which somehow sounded like Audubon’s, though I afterwards ascertained it was really that of the assistant, uttering the rather ridiculous words, ‘I don’t see why!’

“That, then, was the end of my dream, and I have never since been able to continue it, and to discover what was written over the other doors of the third tower, or what lay within the towers I did not enter. So that I have had to go on ever since with the knowledge I then acquired, that whatever Reality may ultimately be, it is in the life of the affections, with all its confused tangle of loves and hates, attractions, repulsions, and, worst of all, indifférences, it is in this intricate commerce of souls that we may come nearest to apprehending what perhaps we shall never wholly apprehend, but the quest of which alone, as I believe, gives any significance to life, and makes it a thing which a wise and brave man will be able to persuade himself it is right to endure.”

With that I ended; and Wilson was just beginning to explain to me that my dream had no real significance, but was just a confused reproduction of what I must have been thinking about before I took the aether, when we were interrupted by the arrival of tea. In the confusion that ensued Audubon came over to me and said: “It was curious your dreaming that about me, for it is exactly the way I should behave.”

“Of course it is,” I replied, “and that, no doubt, is why I dreamt it.”

“Well,” he said, “you can say what you like, but I really do not see why!” And with that the conversation I had to report closed.