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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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