"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, that it was somehow an expression of ourselves, and we of it; that it was its nature and its whole nature to present itself as a Good and our nature and our whole nature to experience it as such. There would be nothing in It alien to us and nothing in us alien to it."
"Whereas in the case of Goods of sense——?"