maginary."

"I dare say it may be," I replied, "but that is of little consequence,
if it helps us to seize our point more clearly; for we are not at
present writing history. Man, then, we will suppose, is thus set out
upon what is, whether he knows it or not, his quest to create, since
he is unable to find ready-made, a world of objects harmonious to
himself. But in this quest has he been, should you say, successful?"

"More or less, I suppose," answered Parry, "for he is progressively
satisfying his needs, even if they are never completely satisfied."

"Perhaps," I replied, "though I sometimes have my doubts. The relation
of man to nature, I have thought, is very strange and obscure. It
is as though he began with the idea that he had only to remove a few
blemishes from her face to make her completely accordant with
his desire. But no sooner has he gone to work than these surface
blemishes, as he thought them, prove to have roots deeper than all
his probings; the more he cuts away the more he exposes of an element
radically alien to himself, terrible and incomprehensible, branching
wide and striking deep, and throwing up from depths unknown those
symptoms and symbols of itself which he mistook for mere superficial
stains."

"Really," protested Parry, "I see no grounds for such a view."

"Perhaps not," I said, "but anyhow you will, I suppose, admit that a
certain precariousness does attach to these Goods of sense, whether
they be freely offered by nature or painfully acquired by the labour
of man."

"Not necessarily," he objected, "for we are constantly reducing to
order and routine what was once haphazard and uncontrolled. For
the great mass of civilized men the primitive goods of life, food,
shelter, clothing and the like, are practically secured against all
chance."

"Are they?" cried Bartlett, "I admire your optimism!"

"And I too," I said. "But even granting that it were as you say,
we are then met by this curious fact, that the Goods we really care
about, in our practical activity, are never those that are secure but
those that are precarious. As soon as we are safe against one risk we
proceed to take another, so that there is always a margin, as it were,
of precarious Goods, and those exactly the ones which we hold most
precious."

"In fact," said Audubon, "as soon as you get your Good it ceases to be
good. That's precisely what I am always saying."

"Then," I said, "there is the less need to labour t