of Good, or any meaning at all in the word; or else, since all men feel the need of an end for action, he will have recourse to a fixed dogma, taken up by accident and clung to with obstinate desperation, without any root in his true inner nature; and to him all discussion about Good will seem to be mere folly, since he will believe either that he possesses it already or that it cannot be possessed at all.  Or If he ask after the method of discovering it, he will be unable to understand it, because he does not choose to develop the necessary experience; and so he will go through life for ever unconvinced, arguing often and angrily, but always with no result, while all the time the knowledge he denies is lying hidden within him, if only he had the patience and faith to seek it there.  But without that, there is no possibility of convincing him; and it will be wiser altogether to leave him alone.  This, whether you call it a method or no, is the only idea I can form as to the possibility of discovering what is Beautiful and Good.”

There was silence for a few moments, and then Wilson said: 

“Do you mean to imply, on your hypothesis, that we all are always seeking Good?”

“No,” I said; “whatever I may think on that point, I have not committed myself.  It is enough for my purpose if we admit that we have the faculty of seeking Good, supposing we choose to do so.”

“And also the faculty of seeking Bad?”

“Possibly; I do not pronounce upon that.”

“Well, anyhow, do you admit the existence of Bad?”

“Oh yes,” I cried, “as much as you like; for it is bad, to my mind, that we should be in a difficult quest of Good, instead of in secure possession of it.  And about the nature of that quest I make no facile assumption.  I do not pretend that what I have called the growth of the soul from within is a smooth and easy process, a quiet unfolding of leafy green in a bright and windless air.  If I recognize the delight of expansion, I recognize also the pain of repression—­the thwarted desire, the unfulfilled hope, the passion vain and abortive.  I do not say even whether or no, in this dim travail of the spirit, pleasure prevails over pain, evil over good.  The most I would claim is to have suggested a meaning for our life in terms of Good; and my view, I half hoped, would have appealed in particular to you, because what I have offered is not an abstract formula, hard to interpret, hard to relate to the actual facts of life, but an attempt to suggest the significance of those facts themselves, to supply a key to the cryptogram we call experience.  And in proportion as we really believed this view to be true, it would lead us not away from but into life, not shutting us up, as has been too much the bent of philosophy, like the homunculus of Goethe’s ‘Faust,’ in the crystal phial of a set and rigid system, to ring our little chiming bell and flash our tiny light over the vast sea of experience,