"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'être?"

"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 æsthetic 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 æsthetically—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, "æsthetically. 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 Walküre, when in his quest for a free, substantial, self-subsistent Good he finds after all, for ever, nothing but images of himself:

"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 formulæ 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 formulæ 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 heresies without a protest."

"Heresies!" 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 Körper, 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!