and followers, or however else we may class them, were, in fact, equally insignificant and absurd, the idle sport of illusions, one as empty and baseless as another.  The history of nations, the lives of individual men, are stripped, in this view, of all interest and meaning; nowhere is there advance or retrogression, nowhere better or worse, nowhere sense or consistency at all.  Systems, however imposing, structures, however vast, fly into dust and powder at a touch.  The stars fall from the human firmament; the beacon-lights dance like will-o’-the-wisps; the whole universe of history opens, cracks, and dissolves in smoke; and we, from an ever-vanishing shore, gaze with impotent eyes at the last gleam on the wings of the dove of Reason as it dips for ever down to eternal night.  Will not that be the only view we can take of the course of human action if we hold that what we believe to be goods have no relation to the true Good?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “I suppose it will.”

“And if we turn,” I continued, “from the past to the present and the future, we find ourselves, I think, in even worse case.  For we shall all, those of us who may come to accept the hypothesis you put forward, be deprived of the consolation even of imagining a reason and purpose in our lives.  The great men of the past, at any rate, could and did believe that they were helping to realize great Goods; but we, in so far as we are philosophers, shall have to forego even that satisfaction.  We shall believe, indeed, that Good exists, and that there is a method of discovering it by pure reason; but this method, we may safely assume, we shall not most of us have ascertained.  Or do you think we shall?”

“I cannot tell,” he said; “I do not profess to have ascertained it myself.”

“And meantime,” I said, “you have not even the right to assume that it is a good thing to endeavour to ascertain it.  For the pursuit of Truth, it must be admitted, is one of the things which we call good; and these, we agreed, have not any relation to the true Good.  Consider, then, the position of these unfortunate men who have learnt indeed that there is a Good, but who know nothing about it, except that it has nothing to do with what they call good.  What kind of life will they live?  Whatever they may put their hand to, they will at once be paralyzed by the thought that it cannot possibly be worth pursuing.  Politics, art, pleasure, science—­of these and all other ends they know but one thing, that all is vanity.  As by the touch of enchantment, their world is turned to dust.  Like Tantalus they stretch lips and hands towards a water for ever vanishing, a fruit for ever withdrawn.  At war with empty phantoms, they ’strike with their spirit’s knife,’ as Shelley has it, ‘invulnerable nothings,’ Dizzy and lost they move about in worlds not only unrealized, but unrealizable, ‘children crying in the night, with no language but a cry,’ and no father to cry to.  And in all this blind confusion the only comfort vouchsafed is that somehow or other they may, they cannot tell how, discover a Good of which the only thing they know is that it has no connection with the Goods they have lost.  Is not this a fair account of the condition to which men would be reduced who really did accept and believe your hypothesis?”