,
by long and tentative effort, learn to distinguish and appraise the
Goods which Nature presents to her; and then, still unsatisfied,
proceed to shape for herself a new world, as it were, of moral art,
fashioning the relations of man to Nature and to his fellow-man under
the stress of her need to realize herself, ever creating and ever
destroying only to create anew, learning in the process her own
nature, yet aware that she has never learnt it, but passing on without
rest to that unimagined consummation wherein the impulse that urges
her on will be satisfied at last, and she will rest in the perfect
enjoyment of that which she knows to be Good, because in it she
has found not only her object but herself. Is not this a possible
conception?"

"I do not say," he replied, "that it is impossible; but I still feel a
difficulty."

"What is it?" I said, "for I am anxious not to shirk anything."

"Well," he said, "you will remember when Parry suggested that the
perception of Good might perhaps be an instinct, you objected that
instincts conflict one with another, and that we therefore require
another faculty to choose between them. Now it seems to me that
your own argument is open to the same objection. You postulate some
faculty--which perhaps you might as well call an instinct--and
this faculty, as I understand you, in the effort to realize itself,
proceeds to discriminate various objects as good. But, now, does this
same faculty also know that the Goods are good, and which is better
than which, and generally in what relations they stand to one another
and to the absolutely Good? Or do we not require here, too, another
faculty to make these judgments, and must not this faculty, as I
said at first, have previously achieved, by some method of its own, a
knowledge of Good, in order that it may judge between Goods?"

"No," I said, "in that way you will get, as you hint, nothing but an
infinite regress. The perception of Good, whenever it comes, must be,
in the last analysis, something direct, immediate, and self-evident;
and so far I am in agreement with Parry. My only quarrel with him was
in regard to his assumption that the judgments we make about Good are
final and conclusive. The experiences we recognize as good are always,
it seems to me, also bad; because we are never able to apprehend or
experience what is absolutely Good. Only, as I like to believe--you
may say I have no grounds for the belief--we are always progres