“Well,” he said, “I am content for the present to leave the matter so.  But I reserve the right to go back upon the argument.”

“Of course!” I replied, “for it is not, I hope, an argument, but a discussion; and a discussion not for victory but for truth.  Meantime, then, let us take as a hypothesis that Good is something to be brought about; and let us consider next the other point that Is included in your position.  According to you, as I understand, what requires to be brought about, if ever Good is to be realized, is not any change in the actual stuff, so to speak, of the world, in the structure, as it were, of our experience, but only a change in our attitude towards all this—­a change in the subject, as they say, and not in the object.  Our aim should be not to abolish what we call evil, by successive modifications of physical and social conditions, but rather, all these remaining essentially the same, to come to see that what appears to be evil is not really so.”

“Yes,” he said, “that is the view I would suggest.”

“So that, for example, though we might still experience a toothache, we should no longer regard it as an evil; and so with all the host of things we are in the habit of calling bad:  they would continue unchanged ‘in themselves,’ as you Hegelians say, only to us they would appear no longer bad, but good?”

“Yes; as I said at first, all reality is good, and all Evil, so-called, is merely illusion.”

I was about to reply when I was forestalled by Bartlett.  For some time past the discussion had been left pretty much to Dennis and myself, with an occasional incursion from Audubon and Leslie.  Ellis had gone indoors; Parry and Wilson were talking together about something else; and Bartlett appeared to be still absorbed in the Chronicle.  I noticed, however, that for the last few moments he had been getting restless, and I suspected that he was listening, behind his newspaper, to what we were saying.  I was not therefore altogether surprised when, upon Dennis’ last remark, he suddenly broke into our debate with the exclamation;

“Would it be’ in order’ to introduce a concrete example?  There is a curiously apt one here in the Chronicle.”

And upon our assenting, he read us a long extract about phosphorus-poisoning, the details of which I now forget, but at any rate it brought before us, very vividly, a tale of cruel suffering and oppression.

“Now,” he said, as he finished, “is that, may I ask, the kind of thing that it amuses you to call mere illusion?”

“Yes,” replied Dennis stoutly, “that will do very well for an example.”

“Well,” he rejoined, “I do not propose to dispute about words; but for my own part I should have thought that, if anything is real, that is; and so, I think, you would find it, if you yourself were the sufferer.”

“But,” objected Dennis, “do you think that it is in the moment of suffering that one is most competent to judge about the reality of pain?”