"Possibly; I do not pronounce upon that."
"Well, anyhow, do you admit the existence of Bad?"
"Oh yes," I cried, "as much as you like; for it is bad, to my mind, that we should be in a difficult quest of Good, instead of in secure possession of it. And about the nature of that quest I make no facile assumption. I do not pretend that what I have called the growth of the soul from within is a smooth and easy process, a quiet unfolding of leafy green in a bright and windless air. If I recognize the delight of expansion, I recognize also the pain of repression—the thwarted desire, the unfulfilled hope, the passion vain and abortive. I do not say even whether or no, in this dim travail of the spirit, pleasure prevails over pain, evil over good. The most I would claim is to have suggested a meaning for our life in terms of Good; and my view, I half hoped, would have appealed in particular to you, because what I have offered is not an abstract formula, hard to interpret, hard to relate to the actual facts of life, but an attempt to suggest the significance of those facts themselves, to supply a key to the cryptogram we call experience. And in proportion as we really believed this view to be true, it would lead us not away from but into life, not shutting us up, as has been too much the bent of philosophy, like the homunculus of Goethe's 'Faust,' in the crystal phial of a set and rigid system, to ring our little chiming bell and flash our tiny light over the vast sea of experience, which all around us foams and floods, myriad-streaming, immense, and clearly seen, yet never felt, through that transparent barrier; but rather, like him when he broke the glass, made free of the illimitable main, to follow under the yellow moon the car of Galatea, her masque of nymphs and tritons, her gliding pomp of cymbals and conchs, away through tempest and calm, by night or day, companioned or alone, to the haunts of the far Cabeiri, and the home where the Mothers dwell."
As I concluded, I looked across at Audubon, to see if I had made any impression upon him. But he only smiled at me rather ironically and said, "Is that meant, may I ask, for an account of everyday experience?"
"Rather," I replied, "for an interpretation of it."
"It would need a great deal of interpretation," he said, "to make anything of the kind out of mine."
"No doubt," I said; "yet I am not without hope that the interpretation may be true; and that some day you may recognize it to be so yourself. Meantime, perhaps, I, who look on, see more of the game than you who play it; and surely in moments of leisure like this you will not refuse to listen to my poor attempt to read the riddle of the sphinx."
"Oh," he said, "I listen gladly enough, but as I would to a poem."
"And do you think," I replied, "that there is not more truth in poetry than in philosophy or science?"
But Wilson entered a vigorous protest, and for a time there was a babel of argument and declamation, from which no clear line of thought disengaged itself. Dennis, however, in his persistent way, had been revolving in his mind what I had said, and at the first opportunity he turned to me with the remark, "There's one point in your position that I can't understand. Do you mean to say that it is our seeking that determines the Good, or the Good that determines our seeking."