The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Meaning of Good--A Dialogue, by G. Lowes
Dickinson

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Title: The Meaning of Good--A Dialogue

Author: G. Lowes Dickinson

Release Date: June 3, 2004 [eBook #12508]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

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THE MEANING OF GOOD--A DIALOGUE

BY G. LOWES DICKINSON

Fellow of King's College, Cambridge,
and Author of a Modern Symposium

THIRD EDITION

1900

DEDICATION

How do the waves along the level shore
Follow and fly in hurrying sheets of foam,
For ever doing what they did before,
For ever climbing what is never clomb!
Is there an end to their perpetual haste,
Their iterated round of low and high,
Or is it one monotony of waste
Under the vision of the vacant sky?
And thou, who on the ocean of thy days
Dost like a swimmer patiently contend,
And though thou steerest with a shoreward gaze
Misdoubtest of a harbour or an end,
What would the threat, or what the promise be,
Could I but read the riddle of the sea!

PREFACE

An attempt at Philosophic Dialogue may seem to demand a word of
explanation, if not of apology. For, it may be said, the Dialogue is
a literary form not only exceedingly difficult to handle, but, in its
application to philosophy, discredited by a long series of failures. I
am not indifferent to this warning; yet I cannot but think that I have
chosen the form best suited to my purpose. For, in the first place,
the problems I have undertaken to discuss have an interest not only
philosophic but practical; and I was ambitious to treat them in a
way which might perhaps appeal to some readers who are not professed
students of philosophy. And, secondly, my subject is one which belongs
to the sphere of right opinion and perception, rather than to that of
logic and demonstration; and seems therefore to be properly approached
in the tentative spirit favoured by the Dialogue form. On such topics
most men, I thin