“True; and here we come by a new path upon the defect which we noticed before in works of art—­that their Beauty, or Goodness, is not essential to their whole nature, but is something imposed, as it were, on an alien stuff.  And it is this alien element that we now pronounce to be unintelligible.”

“Yes; and so, as we agreed before, we cannot pronounce works of art to be absolutely good.”

“No.  But what are we to do then?  Where are we to turn?  Is there nothing in our experience to suggest the kind of object we seem to want?”

No one answered.  I looked round in vain for any help, and then, in a kind of despair, moved by I know not what impulse, I made a direct appeal to Audubon.

“Come!” I cried, “you have said nothing for the last hour!  I am sure you must have something to suggest.”

“No,” he said, “I haven’t.  Your whole way of dealing with these things is a mystery to me.  I can’t conceive, for example, why you have never once referred all through to what I should have thought was the best Good we know—­if, indeed, we know any Good at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why,” he said, “one’s relations to persons.  They’re the only things that I think really worth having—­if anything were worth having.”

A light suddenly broke on me, and I cried, “Yes! an idea!”

“Well,” said Ellis, “what is it, you man of forlorn hopes?”

“Why,” I said, “suppose the very object we are in search of should be found just there?”

“Where?”

“Why, in persons!”

“Persons!” he repeated.  “But what persons?  Any, every, all?”

“Wait one moment,” I cried, “and don’t confuse me!  Let me approach the matter properly.”

“Very well,” he said, “you shan’t be hurried!  You shall have your chance.”

“Let us remind ourselves, then,” I proceeded, “of the point we had reached.  The Good, we agreed, so far as we have been able to form a conception of it, must be something immediately presented, and presented in such a way, that it should be directly intelligible—­intelligible not only in the relations that obtain between its elements, but also in the substance, so to speak, of the elements themselves.  Of such intelligibility we had a type, as Dennis maintained, in the objects of pure thought, ideas and their relations.  But the Good, we held, could not consist in these.  It must be something, we felt, somehow analogous to sense, and yet it could not be sense, for sense did not seem to be intelligible.  But now, when Audubon spoke, it occurred to me that perhaps we might find in persons what we want And that is what I should like to examine now.”

“Well,” said Ellis, “proceed.”

“To begin with, then, a person, I suppose we shall agree, is not sense, though he is manifested through sense.”

“What does that mean?” said Wilson.

“It means only, that a person is not his body, although we know him through his body.”