“Yes.”

“And such a knowledge, if we could attain it, you would call the Good?”

“I think so.”

“Well,” I said, “in the first place, I have to point out that such a Good (if it be one) implies an existence not merely better than that of which we have an experience, but radically and fundamentally different.  For our whole life is bathed in sense.  Not only are we sunk in it up to the neck, but the greater part of the time our heads are under too,—­in fact most of us never get them out at all; it is only a few philosophers every now and again who emerge for a moment or two into sun and air, to breathe that element of pure thought which is too fine even for them, except as a rare indulgence.  At other times, they too must be content with the grosser atmosphere which is the common sustenance of common men.”

“Well,” he said, “but what of that?  We have not been maintaining that the Good is within easy reach of all.”

“No,” cried Ellis.  “But even if it were, and were such as you describe it, very few people would care to put out their hands to take it.  I, at any rate, for my part can see hardly a vestige of Good in the kind of activity I understand you to mean.  It is as though you should say, that Good consists in the perpetual perception that 2 + 2 = 4.”

“But that is an absurd parody.  For the point of knowledge would be, that it would be a closed circle of necessary connections.  One would move in it, as in infinity, with a motion that is also rest, central at once and peripheral, free and yet bound by law.  That is my ideal of a perfect activity!”

“In form, perhaps,” I said, “but surely not in content!  For what, in fact, in our experience comes nearest to what you describe?  I suppose the movement of a logic like Hegel’s?”

“Yes; only that, of course, is imperfect, full of lapses and flaws!”

“But even if it were perfect,” cried Ellis, “would it be any the better?  Imagine being deprived of the whole content of life—­of nature, of history, of art, of religion, of everything in which we are really interested; imagine being left to turn for ever, like a squirrel in a cage, or rather like the idea of a squirrel in the idea of a cage, round and round the wheel of these hollow notions, without hands, without feet, without anything anywhere by which we could lay hold of a something that is not thought, a something solid, resistant, palpitating, ‘luscious and aplomb,’ as Walt Whitman might say, a sense, a flesh, call it what you will, the unintelligible, but still the indispensable, that which, even if it be bad, we cannot afford to miss, and which, if it be not the Good itself, the Good must somehow include!”

Dennis appeared to be somewhat struck by this way of putting the matter.  “But,” he urged, “my difficulty is that if you admit sense, or anything analogous to it, anything at once directly presented and also alien to thought, you get, as you said yourself, something which is unintelligible; and a Good which is not intelligible will be, so far, not good.”