“And this, which is the end of Nature, according to you, is also the Good?”

“Naturally.”

“Well,” I said, “I will not recapitulate here the objections I have already urged against the view that the course of Nature determines the content of the Good.  For, quite apart from that, it is a view which many people hold—­and one which was held long before there was a science of biology—­that the community is the end, and the individual only the means.”

“But,” he said, “biology has given a new basis and a new colour to the view.”

“I don’t know about that,” cried Ellis, unable any longer to restrain himself, “but I am sure it has given us a new kind of language.  In the old days, when Wilson’s opinion was represented by Plato, men were still men, and were spoken of as such, however much they might be subordinated to the community.  But now!—­why, if you open one of these sociological books, mostly, I am bound to say, in German, ’Entwurf einer Sozial-anthropologie,’ ’Versuch einer anthropologischen Darstellung der menschlichen Gesellschaft vom Sozial-biologischen Standpunkt aus,’ and the like—­you will hardly be able to realize that you are dealing with human beings at all.  I have seen an unmarried woman called a ‘female non-childbearing human.’  And at the worst, men actually cease to be even animals; they become mere numbers; they are calculated by the theory of combinations; they are masses, averages, classes, curves, anything but men!  For every million of the population, it has been solemnly estimated, there will be one genius, one imbecile, 256,791 individuals just above the mean, 256,791 just below it!  Observe, 256,791!  Not, as one might have been tempted to believe, 256,790!  What a saving grace in that odd unit!  And this is the kind of thing that is revolutionizing history and politics!  No more great men, no more heroic actions, no more inspirations, passions, and ideals!  Nothing but calculations of the chances that A will meet and breed out of B!  Nothing but analysis of the mechanism of survival!  Nothing but——­”

“My dear Ellis,” interrupted Wilson, “you appear to me to be digressing.”

“Digressing!” he cried “Would that I could digress out of this world altogether!  Would that I could digress to a planet where they have no arithmetic!  Where a man could be a man, not a figure in an addition sum, a unit in an average, an individual in a species——­”

“Where,” exclaimed Audubon, taking him up, “a man could be himself, as I have often said, ‘imperial, plain, and true.’”

There was a chorus of protestation at the too familiar quotation; and for a time I was unable to lay hold of the broken thread of the argument.  But at last I got a hearing for the question I was anxious to address to Wilson.

“You say,” I began, “that by Good we mean the Good of the community?”

“I say,” he replied, “that that is what we ought to mean.”