“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.”

“Well,” I said, “for my own part, I am a good deal in sympathy with what you say.  At the same time there is a difficulty.”

“A difficulty!” cried Leslie, “there are hundreds and thousands!”

“Perhaps,” I replied, “but the particular one to which I was referring is this.  Every civilization, no doubt, has its own standard of Good; but these standards are different and even opposite; so that it would seem we require some criterion by which to compare and judge them.”

“No,” cried Parry, “that is just what I protest against.  We are not concerned with other ideals than our own.  Every great civilization believes in itself.  Take, for instance, the ancient Greeks, of whom you are so fond of talking.  In my opinion they are absurdly over-estimated; but they had at least that good quality—­they believed in themselves.  To them the whole non-Greek world was barbarian; the standard of Good was frankly their own standard; and it was a standard knowable and known, however wide might be the deviations from it in practice.  We find accordingly that for them the ideal was rooted in the real.  Plato, even, in constructing his imaginary republic, does not build in the void, evoking from his own consciousness a Cloud-Cuckoo-city for the Birds; on the contrary, he bases his structure upon the actual, following the general plan of the institutions of Sparta and Crete; and neither to him nor to Aristotle does it ever occur that there is, or could be, any form of state worth considering, except the city-state with which they were familiar.  It is the same with their treatment of ethics; their ideal is that of the Greeks, not of Man in general, and stands in close relation to the facts of contemporary life.  So, too, with their art; it is not, like that of our modern romanticists, an impotent yearning for vaguely-imagined millenniums.  On the contrary, it is an ideal interpretation of their own activity,