why you have never
once referred all through to what I should have thought was the best
Good we know--if, indeed, we know any Good at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Why," he said, "one's relations to persons. They're the only things
that I think really worth having--if anything were worth having."

A light suddenly broke on me, and I cried, "Yes! an idea!"

"Well," said Ellis, "what is it, you man of forlorn hopes?"

"Why," I said, "suppose the very object we are in search of should be
found just there?"

"Where?"

"Why, in persons!"

"Persons!" he repeated. "But what persons? Any, every, all?"

"Wait one moment," I cried, "and don't confuse me! Let me approach the
matter properly."

"Very well," he said, "you shan't be hurried! You shall have your
chance."

"Let us remind ourselves, then," I proceeded, "of the point we had
reached. The Good, we agreed, so far as we have been able to form
a conception of it, must be something immediately presented,
and presented in such a way, that it should be directly
intelligible--intelligible not only in the relations that obtain
between its elements, but also in the substance, so to speak, of the
elements themselves. Of such intelligibility we had a type, as Dennis
maintained, in the objects of pure thought, ideas and their relations.
But the Good, we held, could not consist in these. It must be
something, we felt, somehow analogous to sense, and yet it could not
be sense, for sense did not seem to be intelligible. But now, when
Audubon spoke, it occurred to me that perhaps we might find in persons
what we want And that is what I should like to examine now."

"Well," said Ellis, "proceed."

"To begin with, then, a person, I suppose we shall agree, is not
sense, though he is manifested through sense."

"What does that mean?" said Wilson.

"It means only, that a person is not his body, although we know him
through his body."

"If he isn't his body," said Wilson, "he is probably only a function
of it."

"Oh!" I said, "I know nothing about that. I only know that when we
talk of a person, we don't mean merely his body."

"No," said Ellis, "but we certainly mean also his body. Heaven save
me from a mere naked soul, 'ganz ohne Koerper, ganz abstrakt,' as Heine
says."

"But, at any rate," I said, "let me ask you, for the moment, to
consider the soul apart from the body."

"The soul," cried Wilson, "I thought we weren't to talk about body and
soul."

"Well," I s