"He means he won't," said Ellis, breaking in with his usual air of an unprejudiced outsider, "But after all, what does it really matter? Whatever the reason may be for our uncertainty as to Good, the fact remains that we are uncertain. There's my Good, thy Good, his Good, our Good, your Good, their Good; and all these Goods in process of flux, according to the time of day, the time of life, and the state of the liver. That being so, what is the use of discussing Good in itself? And why be so disturbed about it? There's Leslie, for instance, looking as if the bottom were knocked out of the universe because he can't discover his objective standard! My dear boy, life goes on just the same, my life, his life, your life, all the lives. Why not make an end of the worry at once by admitting frankly that Good is a chimæra, and that we get on very well without it?" "But I don't get on well without it!" Leslie protested. "No," I said, "and I hoped that by this time we were agreed that none of us could. But Ellis is incorrigible." "You don't suppose," he replied, "that I am going to agree with you merely because you override me in argument--even if you did, which you don't." "But at least," cried Leslie, "you needn't tell us so often that you disagree." "Very well," he said, "I am dumb." And for a moment there was silence, till I began to fear that our argument would collapse; when, to my relief, Parry returned to the charge. "You will think me," he began, "as obstinate as Ellis; but I can't help coming back to my old point of view. Somehow or other, I feel sure you are making a difficulty which the practical man does not really feel. You object to my saying that he knows what is good by instinct; but somehow or other I am sure that he does know it. And what I suggest now is, that he finds it written in experience." "In whose experience?" Leslie asked defiantly. "In that of the race, or, at least, in that of his own age and country. Now, do be patient a moment, and let me explain! What I want to suggest is, that every civilization worth the name possesses, in its laws and institutions, in the customs it blindly follows, the moral code it instinctively obeys, an actual objective standard, worked out in minute detail, of what, in every department of life, really is good. To this standard every plain man, without reasoning, and even without reflexion, does in fact simply and naturally conform; so do all of us who are discussing here, in all the common affairs of our daily life. We know, if I may say so, better than we know; and the difficulties into which we are driven, in speculations such as that upon which we are engaged, arise, to my mind, from a false and unnecessary abstraction--from putting aside all the rich content of actual life, and calling into the wilderness for the answer to a question which solves itself in the street and the market-place."