every department of life,
really is good. To this standard every plain man, without reasoning,
and even without reflexion, does in fact simply and naturally conform;
so do all of us who are discussing here, in all the common affairs of
our daily life. We know, if I may say so, better than we know; and the
difficulties into which we are driven, in speculations such as
that upon which we are engaged, arise, to my mind, from a false and
unnecessary abstraction--from putting aside all the rich content
of actual life, and calling into the wilderness for the answer to a
question which solves itself in the street and the market-place."

"Well," I said, "for my own part, I am a good deal in sympathy with
what you say. At the same time there is a difficulty."

"A difficulty!" cried Leslie, "there are hundreds and thousands!"

"Perhaps," I replied, "but the particular one to which I was referring
is this. Every civilization, no doubt, has its own standard of Good;
but these standards are different and even opposite; so that it would
seem we require some criterion by which to compare and judge them."

"No," cried Parry, "that is just what I protest against. We are not
concerned with other ideals than our own. Every great civilization
believes in itself. Take, for instance, the ancient Greeks, of
whom you are so fond of talking. In my opinion they are absurdly
over-estimated; but they had at least that good quality--they believed
in themselves. To them the whole non-Greek world was barbarian; the
standard of Good was frankly their own standard; and it was a standard
knowable and known, however wide might be the deviations from it in
practice. We find accordingly that for them the ideal was rooted in
the real. Plato, even, in constructing his imaginary republic,
does not build in the void, evoking from his own consciousness
a Cloud-Cuckoo-city for the Birds; on the contrary, he bases
his structure upon the actual, following the general plan of the
institutions of Sparta and Crete; and neither to him nor to Aristotle
does it ever occur that there is, or could be, any form of state worth
considering, except the city-state with which they were familiar. It
is the same with their treatment of ethics; their ideal is that of
the Greeks, not of Man in general, and stands in close relation to the
facts of contemporary life. So, too, with their art; it is not,
like that of our modern romanticists, an impotent yearning for
vaguely-imagin