“Faith!” protested Wilson, “that is a dangerous word!”

“It is,” I agreed.  “Yet I doubt whether we can dispense with it.  Only we must remember that to have ‘faith’ in a proposition is not to affirm that it is true, but to live as we should do if it were.  It is, in fact, an attitude of the will, not of the understanding; the attitude of the general going into battle, not of the philosopher in his closet.”

“But,” he objected, “where we do not know, the proper attitude is suspense of mind.”

“In many matters, no doubt,” I replied, “but surely not in those with which we are dealing.  For we must live or die; and if we are to choose to do either, we must do so by virtue of some assumption about the Good.”

“But why should we choose to do either?  Why should not we simply wait?”

“But wait how? wait affirming or denying? active or passive?  Is it possible to wait without adopting an attitude?  Is not waiting itself an attitude, an acting on the assumption that it is good to wait?”

“But, at any rate, it does not involve assumptions as large as those which you are trying to make us accept.”

“I am not trying to make you do anything; I am only trying to discover what you make yourself do.  And do you, as a matter of fact, really dispute the main conclusions to which we have come, or rather, if you will accept my phrase, the main ‘postulates of the will’ which we have elicited?”

“What are they?  Let me have them again.”

“Well,” I said, “here they are.  First, that Good has some meaning.”

“Agreed!”

“Second, that we know something about that meaning.”

“Doubtful!” said Dennis.  “But it will be no use now to resume that controversy.”

“No,” I replied, “only I thought I had shown that if we know nothing about it, then, for us, it has no meaning; and so our first assumption is also destroyed, and with it all significance in life.”

“Well,” he said, “go on.  We can’t go over all that again.”

“Third,” I continued, “that among our experiences the one which comes nearest to Good is that which we called love.”

“Possible!” said Dennis, “but a very tentative approximation.”

“Certainly,” I agreed, “and subject to constant revision.”

“And after that?”

“Well,” I said, “now comes the point Audubon raised.  Is it necessary to include also the postulate that Good can be realized?”

“But surely,” objected Wilson, “here at least there is no room for what you call faith.  For whether or no the Good can be realized is a question of knowledge.”

“No doubt,” I replied, “and so are all questions—­if only we could know.  But I was assuming that this is one of the things we do not know.”

“But,” he said, “it is one we are always coming to know.  Every year we are learning more and more about the course and destiny of mankind.”