“My dear Ellis,” protested Wilson, “what’s the use of talking like that?  It’s not really sublime, it’s only ridiculous!”

“Certainly!” retorted Ellis; “it’s you who are sublime.  I prefer the ridiculous.”

“So,” I said, “does Wilson, if one may judge by appearances.  For I cannot help thinking he is really laughing at us.”

“Not at all,” he replied, “I am perfectly serious.”

“But surely,” I said, “you must see that any discussion about Good must turn somehow upon our perception of it?  The course of Nature may, as you say, be good; but Nature cannot be the measure of Good; the measure can only be Good itself; and the most that the study of Nature could do would be to illuminate our perception by giving it new material for judgment.  Judge we must, in the last resort; and the judgment can never be a mere statement as to the course which Nature is pursuing.”

“Well,” said Wilson, “but you will admit at least the paramount importance of the study of Nature, if we are ever to form a right judgment?”

“I feel much more strongly,” I replied, “the importance of the study of Man; however, we need not at present discuss that.  All that I wanted to insist upon was, that the contention which you have been trying to sustain, that it is possible, somehow or other, to get rid of the subjectivity of our judgments about Good by substituting for them a statement about the tendencies of Nature—­that this contention cannot be upheld.”

“If that be so,” he said, “I don’t see how you are ever to get a scientific basis for your judgment.”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “that we can.  It depends upon what you include under science.”

“Oh,” he said, “by science I mean the resumption in brief formulae of the sequence of phenomena; or, more briefly, a description of what happens.”

“If that be so,” I replied, “the method of judging about Good can certainly not be scientific; for judgments about Good are judgments of what ought to be, not of what is.”

“But then,” objected Wilson, “what method is left you?  You have nothing to fall back upon but a chaos of opinions.”

“But might there not be some way of judging between opinions?”

“How should there be, in the absence of any external objective test?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why,” he replied, “the kind of test which you have in the case of the sciences.  They depend, in the last resort, not on ideas of ours, but on the routine of common sense-perception; a routine which is independent of our choice or will, but is forced upon us from without with an absolute authority such as no imaginings of our own can impugn.  Thus we get a certainty upon which, by the power of inference, whose mechanism we need not now discuss, we are able to build up a knowledge of what is.  But when, on the other hand, we turn to such of our ideas as deal with the Good, the Beautiful, and the