“Yes,” he assented, “and that is what is brought home to one by travel.  Though really, if one had penetration enough, it would not be necessary to travel to make the discovery.  A single country, a single city, almost a single village, would illustrate, to one who can look below the surface, the same truth.  Under the professed uniformity of beliefs, even here in England, what discrepancies and incongruities are concealed!  Every type, every individual almost, is distinguished from every other in precisely this point of the judgments he makes about Good.  What does the soldier and adventurer think of the life of a studious recluse? or the city man of that of the artist? and vice versa?  Behind the mask of good manners we all of us go about judging and condemning one another root and branch.  We are in no real agreement as to the worth either of men or things.  It is an illusion of the ‘canting moralist’ (to use Stevenson’s phrase) that there is any fixed and final standard of Good.  Good is just what any one thinks it to be; and one man has as much right to his opinion as another.”

“But,” I objected, “it surely does not follow that because there are different opinions about Good, they are all equally valuable.”

“No.  I should infer rather that they are all equally worthless.”

“That does not seem to me legitimate either; and I venture to doubt whether you really believe it yourself.”

“Well, at any rate I am inclined to think I do.”

“In a sense perhaps you do; but not in the sense which seems to me most important.  I mean that when it comes to the point, you act, and are practically bound to act, upon your opinion about what is good, as though you did believe it to be true.”

“How do you mean ‘practically bound?’”

“I mean that it is only by so acting that you are able to introduce any order or system into your life, or in fact to give it to yourself any meaning at all.  Without the belief that what you hold to be good really somehow is so, your life, I think, would resolve itself into mere chaos.”

“I don’t see that”

“Well, I may be wrong, but my notion is that what systematizes a life is choice; and choice, I believe, means choice of what we hold to be good.”

“Surely not!  Surely we may choose what we hold to be bad.”

“I doubt it”

“But how then do you account for what you call bad men?”

“I should say they are men who choose what I think bad but they think good.”

“But are there not men who deliberately choose what they think bad, like Milton’s Satan—­’Evil be thou my Good’?”

“Yes, but by the very terms of the expression he was choosing what he thought good; only he thought that evil was good.”

“But that is a contradiction.”

“Yes, it is the contradiction in which he was involved, and in which I believe everyone is involved who chooses, as you say, the Bad.  To them it is not only bad, it is somehow also good.”