Chapter X: Book II (3)

"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!

"'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 chimæras. 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 irréparable?' 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."