“Does that apply to Nero, for example?”

“Yes, I think it very well might; the things which he chose, power and wealth and the pleasures of the senses, he chose because he thought them good; if his choice also involved what he thought bad, such as murder and rapine and the like (if he did think these bad, which I doubt), then there was a contradiction not so much in his choice as in its consequences.  But even if I were to admit that he and others have chosen and do choose what they believe to be bad, it would not affect the point I want to make.  For to choose Bad must be, in your view, as absurd as to choose Good; since, I suppose, you do not believe, that our opinions about the one have any more validity than our opinions about the other.  So that if we are to abandon Good as a principle of choice, it is idle to say we may fall back upon Bad.”

“No, I don’t say that we may; nor do I see that we must We do not need either the one or the other.  You must have noticed—­I am sure I have—­that men do not in practice choose with any direct reference to Good or Bad; they choose what they think will bring them pleasure, or fame, or power, or, it may be, barely a livelihood.”

“But believing, surely, that these things are good?”

“Not necessarily; not thinking at all about it, perhaps.”

“Perhaps not thinking about it as we are now; but still, so far believing that what they have chosen Is good, that if you were to go to them and suggest that, after all, it is bad they would be seriously angry and distressed.”

“But, probably,” interposed Audubon, “like me, they could not help themselves.  We are none of us free, in the way you seem to imagine.  We have to choose the best we can, and often it is bad enough.”

“No doubt,” I replied, “but still, as you say yourself, what we choose is the best we can, that is, the most good we can.  The criterion is Good, only it is very little of it that we are able to realize.”

“No,” objected Ellis, “I am not prepared to admit that the criterion is Good.  You will find that men will frankly confess that other pursuits or occupations are, in their opinion, better than those they have chosen, and that these better things were and are open to themselves, and yet they continue to devote themselves to the worse, knowing it all the time to be the worse.”

“But in most cases,” I replied, “these better things, surely, are not really ‘open’ to them, except so far as external circumstances are concerned.  They are hampered in their choice by passions and desires, by that part of them which does not choose, but is passively carried away by alien attractions; and the course they actually adopt is the best they can choose, though they see a better which they would choose if they could.  The choice is always of Good, but it may be diverted by passion to less Good.”

“I don’t know,” he said, “that that is a fair account of the matter.”