life. You may
have given up reading books about it; and, for that matter, so have I.
But that is only because I want to grapple with it more closely."

"What do you do, then, if you do not read books?"

"I talk to as many people as I can, and especially to those who have
had no special education in philosophy; and try to find out to what
conclusions they have been led by their own direct experience."

"Conclusions about what?"

"About many things. But in particular about the point we used to be
fondest of discussing in the days before you had, as you say, given
up the subject--I mean the whole question of the values we attach, or
ought to attach, to things."

"Oh!" he said, "well, as to all that, my opinion is the same as of
old. 'There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,' So I used
to say at college and so I say now."

"I remember," I replied, "that that is what you always used to say;
but I thought I had refuted you over and over again."

"So you may have done, as far as logic can refute; but every bit of
experience which I have had since last we met has confirmed me in my
original view."

"That," I said, "is very interesting, and is just what I want to hear
about. What is it that experience has done for you? For, as you
know, I have so little of my own, I try to get all I can out of other
people's."

"Well," he said, "the effect of mine has been to bring home to me,
in a way I could never realize before, the extraordinary diversity of
men's ideals."

"That, you find, is the effect of travel?"

"I think so. Travelling really does open the eyes. For instance, until
I went to the East I never really felt the antagonism between the
Oriental view of life and our own. Now, it seems to me clear that
either they are mad or we are; and upon my word, I don't know which.
Of course, when one is here, one supposes it is they. But when one
gets among them and really talks to them, when one realizes how
profound and intelligent is their contempt for our civilization,
how worthless they hold our aims and activities, how illusory our
progress, how futile our intelligence, one begins to wonder whether,
after all, it is not merely by an effect of habit that one judges them
to be wrong and ourselves right, and whether there is anything at
all except blind prejudice in any opinions and ideas about Right and
Wrong."

"In fact," interposed Audubon, "you agree, like me, with Sir Richard
Burton:

"'There is no