! But even so, I
don't know what to make of the position. For it is very difficult to
conceive a society perpetually and exclusively occupied, so to speak,
in 'oughting.' Just imagine the kind of life It would be--without
pleasure, without business, without knowledge, without anything at all
analogous to what we call good, purged wholly and completely of all
that might taint the purity of the moral sense, of philanthropy, of
friendship, of love, even, I suppose, of the love of virtue, a life
simply of obligation, without anything to be obliged to except a law."

"But," he protested, "you are taking an absurd and impossible case."

"I am taking the case which you yourself put, when you said that Good
consisted simply in doing what one ought, independently of all other
accompaniment or condition. But perhaps that is not what you really
meant?"

"No," he said; "of course, what I meant was that it is life according
to the moral law that is Good; but I did not intend to separate the
law from the life, and call it Good all by itself."

"But is the life the better for the law, in the sense, I mean, in
which law involves constraint? Or would it not be better still if the
same life were pursued freely for its own sake?"

"Perhaps so."

"But, then, in that case, the more we realized Good the less we should
be aware of obligation. And would a life without conscious and felt
obligation be a life specifically ethical, in the sense in which you
seemed to be using the word?"

"I should think not; for 'ought' in the ethical sense does certainly
seem to me to involve the idea of obligation."

"In that case it would seem to be truer to say that activity is Good,
not in so far as it is ethical but precisely in so far as it is not.
At any rate, I should maintain that we come nearer to a realization
of Good in the activities which we pursue without effort or friction,
than in those which involve a struggle between duty and inclination."

"But the activities we pursue without effort or friction often enough
are bad."

"No doubt; but some of them are good, and it is to those I should look
for the best idea I could form of what Good might be."

"Well," he said, "go on! Once more I have entered my protest; and now
I leave the road clear."

"The worst of you is," said Ellis, "that you always turn up in front!
When we think we have passed you once for all, you take a short cut
across the fields, and there you are in the middle of t