“But,” I said, “when you say that you trust the instinct, do you mean that you judge it to be good?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Then in trusting the instinct you are really trusting your reason, which judges the instinct to be good, or, if not your reason, the faculty, whatever it be, which judges of Good.  And the only difference between us is, that I try to ascertain what we do really believe to be good, whereas you accept and cling to a particular judgment about Good, without any attempt to test it and harmonize it with others.”

“But you admit yourself that all your results are tentative and problematical in the extreme.”

“Certainly.”

“And yet these results you venture to set in opposition to a simple, profound, imperative cry of Nature!”

“Why should I not?  For I have no right to suppose that nature is good, except in so far as I can reasonably judge her to be so.”

“That seems to me a sort of blasphemy.”

“I am afraid,” I said, “if I must choose, I would rather blaspheme Nature than Reason.  But I hope I am not blaspheming either.  For it may be that what you call Nature has provided for the realization of Good.  That, at any rate, is the hypothesis I was suggesting; and it is you who appear to be setting it aside.”

“But,” objected Wilson, “you talk of this hypothesis as if it were something one could really entertain!  To me it is not a hypothesis at all; it’s simply an inconceivability.”

“Do you mean that it is self-contradictory?”

“No, not exactly that.  Simply that it is unimaginable.”

“Oh!” I said; “but what one can imagine depends on the quality of one’s imagination!  To me, for example, the immortality of the soul does not seem any harder to imagine than birth and life, and death and consciousness.  It’s all such a mystery together, if once one begins trying to realize it.”

“No one,” interposed Ellis, “has put that point better than Walt Whitman.”

“True,” I replied, “and that reminds me that I think you hardly did justice to his view when you were quoting him a little while ago.  It is true that he does, as you said, accept all facts, good and bad, and even appears at times to obliterate the distinction between them.  But also, whether consistently or no, he regards them all as phases of a process, good only because of what they promise to be.  So that his view really requires a belief in immortality to justify it; and to him such belief is as natural and simple as to Wilson it is absurd.  There is a passage somewhere, I remember—­perhaps you can quote it—­it begins, ‘Is it wonderful that I should be immortal?’”

“Yes,” he said, “I remember”: 

    “Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is
    immortal;

    “I know it is wonderful—­but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and
    how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful,