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

“Yes, but you began.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” he said, “I don’t think I can.”

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