ips and hands towards a water for ever vanishing, a fruit for
ever withdrawn. At war with empty phantoms, they 'strike with their
spirit's knife,' as Shelley has it, 'invulnerable nothings,' Dizzy and
lost they move about in worlds not only unrealized, but unrealizable,
'children crying in the night, with no language but a cry,' and no
father to cry to. And in all this blind confusion the only comfort
vouchsafed is that somehow or other they may, they cannot tell how,
discover a Good of which the only thing they know is that it has no
connection with the Goods they have lost. Is not this a fair account
of the condition to which men would be reduced who really did accept
and believe your hypothesis?"

"Yes," he said, "perhaps it is, but still I must protest against this
appeal to prejudice and passion. Supposing the truth really were as I
suggested, we should have to face it, whether or no it seemed to ruin
our own life."

"Yes," I agreed, "supposing the truth were so. But, after all, we have
no sufficient theoretical reason for believing it to be so, and
every kind of practical reason against it. We cannot, it is true,
demonstrate--and that was admitted from the first--that any of our
judgments about what is good are true; but there is no reason why we
should not believe--and I should say we must believe--that somehow or
other they do at least have truth in them."

"Well, and if so?"

"If so, we do not depend, as you said we do, or at least we do not
believe ourselves to depend, for our knowledge about Good, upon some
purely rational process not yet discovered; but those things which
we judge to be good really, we think, in some sense or so, and by
analyzing and classifying and comparing our experiences of such things
we may come to see more clearly what it is in them that we judge to be
good; and again by increasing experience we may come to know more Good
than we knew; and generally, if we once admit that we have some light,
we may hope, by degrees, to get more; and that getting of more light
will be the most important business, not only of philosophy, but of
life."

"But if we can judge of Good at all, why do we not judge rightly?
If we really have a perception, how is it that it is confused, not
clear?"

"I cannot tell how or why; but perhaps it is something of this kind.
Our experience, in the first place, is limited, and we cannot know
Good except in so far as we experience it--so, at least, I think,
thou