“If he isn’t his body,” said Wilson, “he is probably only a function of it.”

“Oh!” I said, “I know nothing about that.  I only know that when we talk of a person, we don’t mean merely his body.”

“No,” said Ellis, “but we certainly mean also his body.  Heaven save me from a mere naked soul, ‘ganz ohne Koerper, ganz abstrakt,’ as Heine says.”

“But, at any rate,” I said, “let me ask you, for the moment, to consider the soul apart from the body.”

“The soul,” cried Wilson, “I thought we weren’t to talk about body and soul.”

“Well,” I said, “I didn’t intend to, but I seem to have been driven into it unawares.”

“But what do you mean by the soul?”

“I mean,” I replied, “what I suppose to be the proper object of psychology—­for even people who object to the word ‘soul’ don’t mind talking (in Greek, of course) of the science of the soul.  Anyhow, what I mean is that which thinks and feels and wills.”

“Well, but what about it?” said Ellis.

“The first thing about it is that it is, as it seems to me, of all things the most intelligible.”

“I should have said,” Wilson objected, “that it was of all things the least.”

“Yes; but we are probably thinking of different things.  What you have in your mind is the connection of this thing which you refuse to call the soul, with the body, the genesis and relations of its various faculties, the measurement of its response to stimuli, and all the other points which are examined in books of psychology.  All that I agree is very unintelligible; I, at least, make no profession of understanding it.  But what I meant was, that looking at persons as we know them in ordinary life, or as they are shown to us in literature and art, they really are intelligible to us in the same way that we are intelligible to ourselves.”

“And how is that?”

“Why, through motives and passions.  There is, I suppose, no feeling or action of which human beings are capable, from the very highest to the very lowest, which other human beings may not sympathetically understand, through the mere fact that they have the same nature.  They will understand more or less according as they have more or less sympathy and insight; but in any case they are capable of understanding, and it is the business of literature and art to make them understand.”

“That is surely a curious use of the word ‘understand.’”

“But it is the one, I think, which is important for us.  At any rate, what I mean is that the object presented is so akin, not indeed (as in the case of ideas) merely to our thought, but to our whole complex nature, that it does not demand explanation.”

“What!” cried Audubon.  “Well, all I can say is that most of the people I, at any rate, come across do most emphatically demand explanation.  I don’t see why they’re there, or what they’re doing, or what they’re for.  Their existence Is a perpetual problem to me!  And what’s worse, probably my existence is the same to them!”