“Perhaps; but in what respect inferior?”

“Why, simply as the body is inferior to the soul.”

“But how is that?  You will think me very stupid, but the more I think of it the less I understand this famous distinction between body and soul, and the relation of one to the other.”

“I doubt,” said Wilson, “whether there is a distinction at all.”

“I don’t say that,” I replied.  “I only say that I can’t understand it; and I should be thankful, if possible, to keep it out of our discussion.”

“So should I!” said Wilson.

“Well, but,” Leslie protested, “how can we?”

“I think perhaps we might,” I said.  “For instance, in the case before us, why should we not try directly to define that specific property of the Goods of sense which, according to you, constitutes their defect, without having recourse to these difficult terms body and soul at all?”

“Well,” he agreed, “we might try.”

“What, then” I said, “do you suggest?”

He hesitated a little, and then began in a tentative kind of way: 

“I think what I feel about these Goods is that we are somehow their slaves; they possess us, instead of our possessing them.  They come upon us we hardly know how or whence; they satisfy our desires we can’t tell why; our relation to them seems to be passive rather than active.”

“And that, you think, would not be the case with a true and perfect Good?”

“No, I think not”

“How, then, should we feel towards such a Good?”

“We should feel, I think, that it was somehow an expression of ourselves, and we of it; that it was its nature and its whole nature to present itself as a Good and our nature and our whole nature to experience it as such.  There would be nothing in It alien to us and nothing in us alien to it.”

“Whereas in the case of Goods of sense——?”

“Whereas in their case,” he said, “surely nothing of the kind applies.  For these Goods appear to arise in things and under circumstances which have quite another nature than that of being good for us.  It is not the essence of water to quench our thirst, of fire to cook for us, or of the sun to give us light——­”

“Or of cork-trees to stop our ginger-beer bottles,” added Ellis.

“Quite so,” he continued; “in every case these things that do us good are also quite as ready to do us harm, and, for that matter, to do innumerable things which have no relation to us at all.  So that the goodness they have in them, so far as it is goodness to our senses, they have, as it were, only by accident; and we feel that essentially either they are not Goods, or their goodness is something beyond and different from that which is revealed to sense.”

“Your quarrel, then” I said, “with the Goods of sense, so far as I understand you, is that they inhere, as it were, in a substance which, so far as we can tell, is indifferent to Good, or at any rate to Good of that kind?”