"Well," said Wilson, "but you will admit at least the paramount importance of the study of Nature, if we are ever to form a right judgment?"
"I feel much more strongly," I replied, "the importance of the study of Man; however, we need not at present discuss that. All that I wanted to insist upon was, that the contention which you have been trying to sustain, that it is possible, somehow or other, to get rid of the subjectivity of our judgments about Good by substituting for them a statement about the tendencies of Nature—that this contention cannot be upheld."
"If that be so," he said, "I don't see how you are ever to get a scientific basis for your judgment."
"I don't know," I replied, "that we can. It depends upon what you include under science."
"Oh," he said, "by science I mean the resumption in brief formulæ of the sequence of phenomena; or, more briefly, a description of what happens."
"If that be so," I replied, "the method of judging about Good can certainly not be scientific; for judgments about Good are judgments of what ought to be, not of what is."
"But then," objected Wilson, "what method is left you? You have nothing to fall back upon but a chaos of opinions."
"But might there not be some way of judging between opinions?"
"How should there be, in the absence of any external objective test?"
"What do you mean by that?"