tation."

"Which," replied Wilson, "may be regarded as a _reductio ad absurdum_
of your view."

"Anyhow," I interposed, "we are digressing from our point. What I
really want to know is whether Wilson has any more light to throw on
my difficulties with regard to his notion of the species."

"I have nothing more to say," he replied, "than I have said already."

"But I have!" cried Dennis, "and something very much to the point.
You see now the absurdities into which you are led by the position
you insisted on assuming, that Good involves conscious activity. If
it does, as you rightly inquired (though with a suicidal audacity),
conscious activity in whom? And to that question, of course, you can
find no answer."

"And yet," I said, endeavouring to turn the tables upon him, "I have
known you to maintain yourself that Good not merely involves, but is,
a conscious activity; only an activity in or of God."

"Rather," he replied, "that it _is_ God. But I don't really know
whether we ought to call God a conscious activity. Whatever He or It
be, is something that transcends our imagination. Only the things we
call good are somehow reflexes of God; and we have to accept them
as such without further inquiry. At any rate, we have no right to
endeavour, as you keep doing, to locate Good in some individual
persons."

"Well," I said, "here we come again to a fundamental difference
of view. All the Good of which I am aware as actually existing is
associated, somehow or other, with personal consciousness. I am
willing to admit, for the sake of argument, that the ultimate Good, if
ever we come to know it, might, perhaps, not be so associated. But of
that, as yet, I know nothing; you, perhaps, are more fortunate. And if
you can give us an account of Good, I mean, of course, of its content,
which shall represent it intelligibly to us as independent of any
consciousness like our own, I am quite ready to relinquish the
argument to you."

"I don't know," he replied, "that I can represent It to you in a way
that you would admit to be intelligible. I don't profess to have had
what you call 'experience' of it."

"Well, then," said Ellis, "what's the good of talking?"

"What, indeed!" I echoed, in some despondency. For I began to feel it
was impossible to carry on the conversation. But at this point, to my
great relief, Bartlett came to the rescue, not indeed with a solution
of the difficulty in which we were involved, but with a diver