“What a charming paradox!” cried Ellis.  “And so it is really true that every soldier who dies on the field of battle does so only by virtue of a miscalculation?  And if he could but pull himself up and remember that, after all, the preservation of his life was the only motive that induced him to endanger it, he would run away like a sensible man, and try some other device to achieve his end, the device of society having evidently broken down, so far as he is concerned.”

“There you are again,” said Parry, “with your crude rationalism!  The point is that the social habit has now become an instinct, and has therefore, as I say, imperative authority!  No operations of the reason touch it in the least”

“Well,” rejoined Ellis, “I must say that it seems to me very hard that a man can’t rectify such an important error.  The imposition is simply monstrous!  Here are a number of fellows shut up in society on the distinct understanding, to begin with, that society was to help them to preserve their lives; instead of which, it starves them and hangs them and sends them to be shot in battle, and they aren’t allowed to raise a word of protest or even to perceive what a fraud is being perpetrated upon them!”

“I don’t see that it’s hard at all,” replied Parry; “it seems to me a beautiful device of nature to ensure the predominance of the better instincts.”

“The better instincts!” I cried, “but there is the point!  These instincts of yours, it seems, conflict; in battle, for example, the instinct to run away conflicts with the instinct to stay and fight?”

“No doubt,” he admitted.

“And sometimes one prevails and sometimes the other?”

“Yes.”

“And in the one case we say that the man does right, when he stays and fights; and in the other that he does wrong, when he runs away?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, then, how does your theory of instincts help us to know what is Good?  For it seems that after all we have to choose between instincts, to approve one and condemn another.  And our problem still remains, how can we do this? how can we get any certainty of standard?”

“Perhaps the faculty that judges is itself an instinct?”

“Perhaps it is,” I replied, “I don’t really know what an instinct is.  My quarrel is not with the word instinct, but with what seemed to be your assumption that whatever it is in us that judges about Good judges in a single, uniform, infallible way.  Whereas, in fact, as you had to admit, sometimes at the same moment it pronounces judgments not only diverse but contradictory.”

“But,” he replied, “those seem to me to be exceptional cases.  As a rule the difficulty doesn’t occur.  When it does, I admit that we require a criterion.  But I should expect to find it in science rather than in philosophy.”

“In science!” exclaimed Leslie.  “What has science to do with it?”

“What has not science to do with?” said a new voice from behind.  It was Wilson who, in his turn, had joined us from the breakfast room (he always breakfasted late), and had overheard the last remark.  He was a lecturer in Biology at Cambridge, rather distinguished in that field, and an enthusiastic believer in the capacity of the scientific method to solve all problems.