The Meaning of Good--A Dialogue | Page 5

all these years since we met?"
"Oh," I replied, "nothing worth talking about."
"What have you been thinking then?"
"Just now I have been thinking how well you look. Knocking about the world seems to suit you."
"I think it does. And yet at this moment, whether it be the quiet of the place, or whether it be the sight of your philosophic countenance, I feel a kind of yearning for the contemplative life. I believe if I stayed here long you would lure me back to philosophy; and yet I thought I had finally escaped when I broke away from you before."
"It is not so easy," I said, "to escape from that net, once one is caught. But it was not I who spread the snare; I was only trying to help you out, or, at least, to get out myself."
"And have you found a way?"
"No, I cannot say that I have. That's why I want to talk to you and hear how you have fared."
"I? Oh, I have given the whole subject up."
"You can hardly give up the subject till you give up life. You may have given up reading books about it; and, for that matter, so have I. But that is only because I want to grapple with it more closely."
"What do you do, then, if you do not read books?"
"I talk to as many people as I can, and especially to those who have had no special education in philosophy; and try to find out to what conclusions they have been led by their own direct experience."
"Conclusions about what?"
"About many things. But in particular about the point we used to be fondest of discussing in the days before you had, as you say, given up the subject--I mean the whole question of the values we attach, or ought to attach, to things."
"Oh!" he said, "well, as to all that, my opinion is the same as of old. 'There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so,' So I used to say at college and so I say now."
"I remember," I replied, "that that is what you always used to say; but I thought I had refuted you over and over again."
"So you may have done, as far as logic can refute; but every bit of experience which I have had since last we met has confirmed me in my original view."
"That," I said, "is very interesting, and is just what I want to hear about. What is it that experience has done for you? For, as you know, I have so little of my own, I try to get all I can out of other people's."
"Well," he said, "the effect of mine has been to bring home to me, in a way I could never realize before, the extraordinary diversity of men's ideals."
"That, you find, is the effect of travel?"
"I think so. Travelling really does open the eyes. For instance, until I went to the East I never really felt the antagonism between the Oriental view of life and our own. Now, it seems to me clear that either they are mad or we are; and upon my word, I don't know which. Of course, when one is here, one supposes it is they. But when one gets among them and really talks to them, when one realizes how profound and intelligent is their contempt for our civilization, how worthless they hold our aims and activities, how illusory our progress, how futile our intelligence, one begins to wonder whether, after all, it is not merely by an effect of habit that one judges them to be wrong and ourselves right, and whether there is anything at all except blind prejudice in any opinions and ideas about Right and Wrong."
"In fact," interposed Audubon, "you agree, like me, with Sir Richard Burton:
"'There is no good, there is no bad, these be the whims of mortal will; What works me weal that call I good, what harms and hurts I hold as ill. They change with space, they shift with race, and in the veriest span of time, Each vice has worn a virtue's crown, all good been banned as sin or crime.'"
"Yes," he assented, "and that is what is brought home to one by travel. Though really, if one had penetration enough, it would not be necessary to travel to make the discovery. A single country, a single city, almost a single village, would illustrate, to one who can look below the surface, the same truth. Under the professed uniformity of beliefs, even here in England, what discrepancies and incongruities are concealed! Every type, every individual almost, is distinguished from every other in precisely this point of the judgments he makes about Good. What does the soldier and adventurer think of the life of a studious recluse? or the city