“Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a good highwayman?”
“What now?”
“That he would be an excellent representative man of his class; and therefore, on Mr. Emerson’s grounds, a fit subject for a laudatory lecture.”
“I hate reductiones ad absurdum. Let Turpin take care of himself. I suppose I do not belong to such a very bad sort of men, but that it may be worth my while to become a good specimen of it?”
“Certainly not; only I think, contrary to Mr. Emerson’s opinion, that you will not become even that, unless you first become something better still, namely, a good man.”
“There you are too refined for me. But can you not understand, now, the causes of my sympathy even with Windrush and his ‘spirit of truth’?”
“I can, and those of many more. It seems that you thought you found in that school a wider creed than the one to which you had been accustomed?”
“There was a more comprehensive view of humanity about them, and that pleased me.”
“Doubtless, one can be easily comprehensive if one comprehends good and bad, true and false, under one category, by denying the absolute existence of either goodness or badness, truth or falsehood. But let the view be as comprehensive as it will, I am afraid that the creed founded thereon will not be very comprehensive.”
“Why then?”