A light suddenly broke on me, and I cried, "Yes! an idea!"
"Well," said Ellis, "what is it, you man of forlorn hopes?"
"Why," I said, "suppose the very object we are in search of should be found just there?"
"Where?"
"Why, in persons!"
"Persons!" he repeated. "But what persons? Any, every, all?"
"Wait one moment," I cried, "and don't confuse me! Let me approach the matter properly."
"Very well," he said, "you shan't be hurried! You shall have your chance."
"Let us remind ourselves, then," I proceeded, "of the point we had reached. The Good, we agreed, so far as we have been able to form a conception of it, must be something immediately presented, and presented in such a way, that it should be directly intelligible—intelligible not only in the relations that obtain between its elements, but also in the substance, so to speak, of the elements themselves. Of such intelligibility we had a type, as Dennis maintained, in the objects of pure thought, ideas and their relations. But the Good, we held, could not consist in these. It must be something, we felt, somehow analogous to sense, and yet it could not be sense, for sense did not seem to be intelligible. But now, when Audubon spoke, it occurred to me that perhaps we might find in persons what we want And that is what I should like to examine now."
"Well," said Ellis, "proceed."