“What would you have done?”

“If I had been the botanist?  I would not have made myself disagreeable to the natives.  Also, I would not have got myself into a tangle with that rope.”

“You think he ought to have cut it?”

“What else could the poor fellow do?  It strikes me, Heard, you attach some inordinate importance to human life.”

“It’s all rather complex,” sighed the bishop.

“Now that is really interesting!”

“Interesting?”

“Why should you find it complex, when I find it simple?  Let me see.  Our lives are perfectly insignificant, aren’t they?  We know it for a fact.  But we don’t like it.  We don’t like being of no account.  We want some thing to make us feel more valuable than we are.  Consequently we invent a fiction to explain away that insignificance—­the fiction of a personality overhead everlastingly occupied in watching every single one of us, and keenly engrossed in our welfare.  If this were the case, we would cease to be insignificant, and we might try to oblige him by not killing each other.  It happens to be a fiction.  Get rid of the fiction, and your feeling of complexity evaporates.  I perceive you are in an introspective mood.  Worrying about some pastoral epistle?”

“Worry about my values, as you would say.  Up to the present, Keith, I don’t seem to have had time to think; I had to act; there was always something urgent to be taken in hand.  Now that I am really lazy for the first time, and in this stimulating environment, certain problems of life keep cropping up.  Minor problems, of course; for it is a consolation to know that the foundations of good conduct are immutable.  Our sense of right and wrong is firmly implanted in us.  The laws of morality, difficult as they often are to understand, have been written down for our guidance in letters that never change.”

“Never change?  You might as well say, my dear Heard, that these cliffs never change.  The proof that the laws of good conduct change is this, that if you were upright after the fashion of your great-grandfather you would soon find yourself in the clutches of the law for branding a slave, or putting a bullet through someone in a duel.  I grant that morality changes slowly.  It changes slowly because the proletariat, whose product it is, does the same.  There is not much difference, I imagine, between the crowds of old Babylon and new Shoreditch; hence their peculiar emanations resemble each other more or less.  That is why morality compares so unfavourably with intellectuality, which is the product of the upper sections of society and flashes out new lights every moment.  But even morality changes.  The Spartans, a highly moral people, thought it positively indecent not to steal.  A modern vice, such as mendacity, was accounted a virtue by the greatest nation of antiquity.  A modern virtue, like that of forgiving one’s enemies, was accounted a vice proper to slaves.  Drunkenness, reprobated by ancients and moderns alike, became the mark of a gentlemen in intermediate periods.”