he point. One way
or other, it seems, either because they are difficult to secure, or
because, when secured, they lose their specific quality. Goods of this
kind are caught in the wheels of chance and change, whether they be
offered to man by the free gift of Nature, or wrung from her in the
sweat of his brow. In other words, they are, as I said, precarious.
And now, have they any other defects?"

"Have they any?" cried Leslie, "why they have nothing else!"

"Well," I said, "but what in particular?"

"Oh," he replied, "it's all summed up, I suppose, in the fact that
they are Goods of sense, and not of intellect or of imagination."

"Is it then," I asked, "a defect in content that you are driving
at? Do you mean that they satisfy only a part of our nature, not the
whole? For that, I suppose, would be equally true of the other Goods
you mentioned, such as those of the intellect."

"Yes," he replied, "but it is the inferior part to which the Goods we
are speaking of appeal."

"Perhaps; but in what respect inferior?"

"Why, simply as the body is inferior to the soul."

"But how is that? You will think me very stupid, but the more I think
of it the less I understand this famous distinction between body and
soul, and the relation of one to the other."

"I doubt," said Wilson, "whether there is a distinction at all."

"I don't say that," I replied. "I only say that I can't understand
it; and I should be thankful, if possible, to keep it out of our
discussion."

"So should I!" said Wilson.

"Well, but," Leslie protested, "how can we?"

"I think perhaps we might," I said. "For instance, in the case before
us, why should we not try directly to define that specific property of
the Goods of sense which, according to you, constitutes their defect,
without having recourse to these difficult terms body and soul at
all?"

"Well," he agreed, "we might try."

"What, then" I said, "do you suggest?"

He hesitated a little, and then began in a tentative kind of way:

"I think what I feel about these Goods is that we are somehow their
slaves; they possess us, instead of our possessing them. They come
upon us we hardly know how or whence; they satisfy our desires we
can't tell why; our relation to them seems to be passive rather than
active."

"And that, you think, would not be the case with a true and perfect
Good?"

"No, I think not"

"How, then, should we feel towards such a Good?"

"We should feel, I think, th