; and to live, moreover, a monotonous, laborious life,
which you say you detest Take away that belief, and your whole being
is transformed. Either you change your manner of life, abandon the
routine which you hate, break up the order imposed (as I said at
first) by your idea about Good, and give yourself up to the chaos of
chance desires; or you depart from life altogether, on the hypothesis
that that is the good thing to do. But in any case the truth appears
to remain that somehow or other you do believe in Good; and that it is
this belief which determines the whole course of your life."

"Well," he said, "it's no use arguing the point, but I am
unconvinced." And he sank back to his customary silence. I thought
it useless to pursue the subject with him; but Ellis took up the
argument.

"I agree with Audubon," he said. "For even if I admitted your general
contention, I should still maintain that it is not by virtue of any
conscious idea of Good that we introduce order into our lives. We
simply find ourselves, as a matter of fact, by nature and character,
preferring one object to another, suppressing or developing this or
that tendency. Our choices are not determined by our abstract notion
of Good; on the contrary, our notion of Good is deduced from our
choices."

"You mean, I suppose, that we collect from our particular choices our
general idea of the kind of things which we consider good. That may
be. But the point I insist upon is that we do attach validity to
these choices; they are, to us, our choices of our Good, those that we
approve as distinguished from those that we do not. And my contention
is that, in spite of all diversity of opinions as to what really are
the good things to choose, we are bound to attach, each of us, some
validity to our own, under penalty of reducing our life to a moral
chaos."

"But what do you mean by 'validity'?" asked Leslie. "Do you mean that
we must believe that our opinions are right?"

"Yes," I said, "or, at least, if not that they are right, that they
are the rightest we can attain to for the time being, and until we see
something righter. But above all, that opinions on this subject really
are either right or wrong, or more right and less right; and that of
this rightness or wrongness we really have some kind of perception,
however difficult it may be to give an account of it, and that in
accordance with such perception we may come to change our opinions or
those of other