"And meantime," I said, "you have not even the right to assume that it is a good thing to endeavour to ascertain it. For the pursuit of Truth, it must be admitted, is one of the things which we call good; and these, we agreed, have not any relation to the true Good. Consider, then, the position of these unfortunate men who have learnt indeed that there is a Good, but who know nothing about it, except that it has nothing to do with what they call good. What kind of life will they live? Whatever they may put their hand to, they will at once be paralyzed by the thought that it cannot possibly be worth pursuing. Politics, art, pleasure, science--of these and all other ends they know but one thing, that all is vanity. As by the touch of enchantment, their world is turned to dust. Like Tantalus they stretch lips and hands towards a water for ever vanishing, a fruit for ever withdrawn. At war with empty phantoms, they 'strike with their spirit's knife,' as Shelley has it, 'invulnerable nothings,' Dizzy and lost they move about in worlds not only unrealized, but unrealizable, 'children crying in the night, with no language but a cry,' and no father to cry to. And in all this blind confusion the only comfort vouchsafed is that somehow or other they may, they cannot tell how, discover a Good of which the only thing they know is that it has no connection with the Goods they have lost. Is not this a fair account of the condition to which men would be reduced who really did accept and believe your hypothesis?" "Yes," he said, "perhaps it is, but still I must protest against this appeal to prejudice and passion. Supposing the truth really were as I suggested, we should have to face it, whether or no it seemed to ruin our own life." "Yes," I agreed, "supposing the truth were so. But, after all, we have no sufficient theoretical reason for believing it to be so, and every kind of practical reason against it. We cannot, it is true, demonstrate--and that was admitted from the first--that any of our judgments about what is good are true; but there is no reason why we should not believe--and I should say we must believe--that somehow or other they do at least have truth in them." "Well, and if so?" "If so, we do not depend, as you said we do, or at least we do not believe ourselves to depend, for our knowledge about Good, upon some purely rational process not yet discovered; but those things which we judge to be good really, we think, in some sense or so, and by analyzing and classifying and comparing our experiences of such things we may come to see more clearly what it is in them that we judge to be good; and again by increasing experience we may come to know more Good than we knew; and generally, if we once admit that we have some light, we may hope, by degrees, to get more; and that getting of more light will be the most important business, not only of philosophy, but of life."