attempt to test it and harmonize it with others."

"But you admit yourself that all your results are tentative and
problematical in the extreme."

"Certainly."

"And yet these results you venture to set in opposition to a simple,
profound, imperative cry of Nature!"

"Why should I not? For I have no right to suppose that nature is good,
except in so far as I can reasonably judge her to be so."

"That seems to me a sort of blasphemy."

"I am afraid," I said, "if I must choose, I would rather blaspheme
Nature than Reason. But I hope I am not blaspheming either. For it may
be that what you call Nature has provided for the realization of Good.
That, at any rate, is the hypothesis I was suggesting; and it is you
who appear to be setting it aside."

"But," objected Wilson, "you talk of this hypothesis as if it were
something one could really entertain! To me it is not a hypothesis at
all; it's simply an inconceivability."

"Do you mean that it is self-contradictory?"

"No, not exactly that. Simply that it is unimaginable."

"Oh!" I said; "but what one can imagine depends on the quality of
one's imagination! To me, for example, the immortality of the soul
does not seem any harder to imagine than birth and life, and death and
consciousness. It's all such a mystery together, if once one begins
trying to realize it."

"No one," interposed Ellis, "has put that point better than Walt
Whitman."

"True," I replied, "and that reminds me that I think you hardly did
justice to his view when you were quoting him a little while ago. It
is true that he does, as you said, accept all facts, good and bad, and
even appears at times to obliterate the distinction between them. But
also, whether consistently or no, he regards them all as phases of
a process, good only because of what they promise to be. So that his
view really requires a belief in immortality to justify it; and to him
such belief is as natural and simple as to Wilson it is absurd. There
is a passage somewhere, I remember--perhaps you can quote it--it
begins, 'Is it wonderful that I should be immortal?'"

"Yes," he said, "I remember":

"Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is
immortal;

"I know it is wonderful--but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and
how I was conceived in my mother's womb is equally wonderful,

"And passed from a babe, in the creeping trance of a couple of
summers and winters to articulate and walk