“Perhaps,” I replied, “though I sometimes have my doubts.  The relation of man to nature, I have thought, is very strange and obscure.  It is as though he began with the idea that he had only to remove a few blemishes from her face to make her completely accordant with his desire.  But no sooner has he gone to work than these surface blemishes, as he thought them, prove to have roots deeper than all his probings; the more he cuts away the more he exposes of an element radically alien to himself, terrible and incomprehensible, branching wide and striking deep, and throwing up from depths unknown those symptoms and symbols of itself which he mistook for mere superficial stains.”

“Really,” protested Parry, “I see no grounds for such a view.”

“Perhaps not,” I said, “but anyhow you will, I suppose, admit that a certain precariousness does attach to these Goods of sense, whether they be freely offered by nature or painfully acquired by the labour of man.”

“Not necessarily,” he objected, “for we are constantly reducing to order and routine what was once haphazard and uncontrolled.  For the great mass of civilized men the primitive goods of life, food, shelter, clothing and the like, are practically secured against all chance.”

“Are they?” cried Bartlett, “I admire your optimism!”

“And I too,” I said.  “But even granting that it were as you say, we are then met by this curious fact, that the Goods we really care about, in our practical activity, are never those that are secure but those that are precarious.  As soon as we are safe against one risk we proceed to take another, so that there is always a margin, as it were, of precarious Goods, and those exactly the ones which we hold most precious.”

“In fact,” said Audubon, “as soon as you get your Good it ceases to be good.  That’s precisely what I am always saying.”

“Then,” I said, “there is the less need to labour the point.  One way or other, it seems, either because they are difficult to secure, or because, when secured, they lose their specific quality.  Goods of this kind are caught in the wheels of chance and change, whether they be offered to man by the free gift of Nature, or wrung from her in the sweat of his brow.  In other words, they are, as I said, precarious.  And now, have they any other defects?”

“Have they any?” cried Leslie, “why they have nothing else!”

“Well,” I said, “but what in particular?”

“Oh,” he replied, “it’s all summed up, I suppose, in the fact that they are Goods of sense, and not of intellect or of imagination.”

“Is it then,” I asked, “a defect in content that you are driving at?  Do you mean that they satisfy only a part of our nature, not the whole?  For that, I suppose, would be equally true of the other Goods you mentioned, such as those of the intellect.”

“Yes,” he replied, “but it is the inferior part to which the Goods we are speaking of appeal.”