have any true opinions on the subject at all."

"And what do you say to that?" asked Parry, turning to me.

"I said, or rather I suggested, for the whole matter is very difficult
to me, that in spite of the divergency of opinions on the point, and
the difficulty of bringing them into harmony, we are nevertheless
practically bound, whether we can justify it to our reason or not,
to believe that our own opinions about what is good have somehow some
validity."

"But how 'practically bound'?" asked Leslie.

"Why, as I was trying to get Ellis to admit when you interrupted--and
your interruption really completed my argument--I imagine it to be
impossible for us not to make choices; and in making choices, as I
think, we use our ideas about Good as a principle of choice."

"But you must remember," said Ellis, "that I have never admitted the
truth of that last statement."

"But," I said, "if you do not admit it generally--and generally, I
confess, I do not see how it could be proved or disproved, except by
an appeal to every individual's experience--do you not admit it in
your own case? Do you not find that, in choosing, you follow your idea
of what is good, so far as you can under the limitations of your own
passions and of external circumstances?"

"Well," he replied, "I wish to be candid, and I am ready to admit that
I do."

"And that you cannot conceive yourself as choosing otherwise? I mean
that if you had to abandon as a principle of choice your opinion about
Good, you would have nothing else to fall back upon?"

"No; I think in that case I should simply cease to choose."

"And can you conceive yourself doing that? Can you conceive yourself
living, as perhaps many men do, at random and haphazard, from moment
to moment, following blindly any impulse that may happen to turn
up, without any principle by which you might subordinate one to the
other?"

"No," he said, "I don't think I can."

"That, then," I said, "is what I meant, when I suggested that you, at
any rate, and I, and other people like us, are practically bound to
believe that our opinions about what is good have some validity, even
though we cannot say what or how much."

"You say, then, that we have to accept in practice what we deny in
theory?"

"Yes, if you like. I say, at least, that the consequence of the
attempt to bring our theoretical denial to bear upon our practice
would be to reduce our life to a moral chaos, by denying the only
princ