"The better instincts!" I cried, "but there is the point! These instincts of yours, it seems, conflict; in battle, for example, the instinct to run away conflicts with the instinct to stay and fight?"
"No doubt," he admitted.
"And sometimes one prevails and sometimes the other?"
"Yes."
"And in the one case we say that the man does right, when he stays and fights; and in the other that he does wrong, when he runs away?"
"I suppose so."
"Well, then, how does your theory of instincts help us to know what is Good? For it seems that after all we have to choose between instincts, to approve one and condemn another. And our problem still remains, how can we do this? how can we get any certainty of standard?"
"Perhaps the faculty that judges is itself an instinct?"
"Perhaps it is," I replied, "I don't really know what an instinct is. My quarrel is not with the word instinct, but with what seemed to be your assumption that whatever it is in us that judges about Good judges in a single, uniform, infallible way. Whereas, in fact, as you had to admit, sometimes at the same moment it pronounces judgments not only diverse but contradictory."
"But," he replied, "those seem to me to be exceptional cases. As a rule the difficulty doesn't occur. When it does, I admit that we require a criterion. But I should expect to find it in science rather than in philosophy."