"It seems so to me. In so far as a thing is beautiful it does not, I think, demand explanation, but only in so far as it is something else as well."
"Perhaps. But anyhow, inasmuch as a work of art is also sense, so far at least it is not intelligible."
"True; and here we come by a new path upon the defect which we noticed before in works of art—that their Beauty, or Goodness, is not essential to their whole nature, but is something imposed, as it were, on an alien stuff. And it is this alien element that we now pronounce to be unintelligible."
"Yes; and so, as we agreed before, we cannot pronounce works of art to be absolutely good."
"No. But what are we to do then? Where are we to turn? Is there nothing in our experience to suggest the kind of object we seem to want?"
No one answered. I looked round in vain for any help, and then, in a kind of despair, moved by I know not what impulse, I made a direct appeal to Audubon.
"Come!" I cried, "you have said nothing for the last hour! I am sure you must have something to suggest."
"No," he said, "I haven't. Your whole way of dealing with these things is a mystery to me. I can't conceive, for example, why you have never once referred all through to what I should have thought was the best Good we know—if, indeed, we know any Good at all."
"What do you mean?"
"Why," he said, "one's relations to persons. They're the only things that I think really worth having—if anything were worth having."