which all around us foams and floods, myriad-streaming, immense, and clearly seen, yet never felt, through that transparent barrier; but rather, like him when he broke the glass, made free of the illimitable main, to follow under the yellow moon the car of Galatea, her masque of nymphs and tritons, her gliding pomp of cymbals and conchs, away through tempest and calm, by night or day, companioned or alone, to the haunts of the far Cabeiri, and the home where the Mothers dwell.”

As I concluded, I looked across at Audubon, to see if I had made any impression upon him.  But he only smiled at me rather ironically and said, “Is that meant, may I ask, for an account of everyday experience?”

“Rather,” I replied, “for an interpretation of it.”

“It would need a great deal of interpretation,” he said, “to make anything of the kind out of mine.”

“No doubt,” I said; “yet I am not without hope that the interpretation may be true; and that some day you may recognize it to be so yourself.  Meantime, perhaps, I, who look on, see more of the game than you who play it; and surely in moments of leisure like this you will not refuse to listen to my poor attempt to read the riddle of the sphinx.”

“Oh,” he said, “I listen gladly enough, but as I would to a poem.”

“And do you think,” I replied, “that there is not more truth in poetry than in philosophy or science?”

But Wilson entered a vigorous protest, and for a time there was a babel of argument and declamation, from which no clear line of thought disengaged itself.  Dennis, however, in his persistent way, had been revolving in his mind what I had said, and at the first opportunity he turned to me with the remark, “There’s one point in your position that I can’t understand.  Do you mean to say that it is our seeking that determines the Good, or the Good that determines our seeking.”

“Really,” I said, “I don’t know.  I should say both are true.  We, in the process of our seeking, affirm what we find to be good, and in that sense determine for ourselves what for us was previously indeterminate; but, on the other hand, our determination is not mere caprice; it is determination of Good, which we must therefore suppose somehow or other to ‘be’ before we discern it.”

“But then, in what sense is it?”

“That is what it is so hard to say.  Perhaps it is the law of our seeking, the creative and urging principle of the world, striving through us to realize itself, and recognized by us in that effort and strain.”

“Then your hypothesis is that Good has to be brought about, even while you admit that in some sense it is?”

“Yes, it exists partially, and it ought to come to exist completely.”

“Well now, that is exactly what seems to me absurd.  If Good is at all it is eternal and complete.”

“But then, I ask in my turn, in what sense is it?”

“In the only sense that anything really is.  The rest is nothing but appearance.”