"Certainly."
"And yet these results you venture to set in opposition to a simple, profound, imperative cry of Nature!"
"Why should I not? For I have no right to suppose that nature is good, except in so far as I can reasonably judge her to be so."
"That seems to me a sort of blasphemy."
"I am afraid," I said, "if I must choose, I would rather blaspheme Nature than Reason. But I hope I am not blaspheming either. For it may be that what you call Nature has provided for the realization of Good. That, at any rate, is the hypothesis I was suggesting; and it is you who appear to be setting it aside."
"But," objected Wilson, "you talk of this hypothesis as if it were something one could really entertain! To me it is not a hypothesis at all; it's simply an inconceivability."
"Do you mean that it is self-contradictory?"
"No, not exactly that. Simply that it is unimaginable."
"Oh!" I said; "but what one can imagine depends on the quality of one's imagination! To me, for example, the immortality of the soul does not seem any harder to imagine than birth and life, and death and consciousness. It's all such a mystery together, if once one begins trying to realize it."
"No one," interposed Ellis, "has put that point better than Walt Whitman."