The Meaning of Good-A Dialogue Part 26

"And what is that?"

"One, as I said just now, that should be eternal and all-comprehensive."

"And so, in the end, you have nothing better than an imaginary heaven to land us in!"

"I have no power, I fear, to land you there. But I believe there is that dwelling within you which will not let you rest in anything short."

"Then I fear I shall never rest!"

"That may be. But meantime all I want to do is to ascertain, if we can, the meaning of your unrest. I have no interest in what you call an imaginary heaven, except in so far as its conception is necessary to enable us to interpret the world we know."

"But how should it be necessary? I have never found it so."

"It is necessary, I think, to explain our dissatisfaction. For the Goods we actually realize always point away from themselves to some other Good whose realization perhaps, as you say, for us is impossible. But even if the Good were chimerical, we cannot deny the pa.s.sion that pursues it; for it is the same pa.s.sion that urges us to the pursuit of such Goods as we really can attain. And if we want to understand the nature of that pa.s.sion, we must understand the nature of its Good, whether it be attainable or no. Only it is for the sake of life here that we need that comprehension, not for the sake of life somewhere else."

"But do you reduce our pa.s.sion for Good to this pa.s.sion for Love?"

"I don't 'reduce' it; I interpret it so."

"And so we come back to the girl and the boy and the village green!"

"No! we come back to the whole of life, of which that is only an episode. Let me try to explain how the thing presents itself to me."

"By all means! That is what I want."

"Very well; I will do my best. Let us look then at life just as it is.

Here we find ourselves involved with one another in the most complex relations--economic, political, social, domestic, and the rest; and about and in these relations centres the interest of our life, whether it be pleasurable or painful, empty or full, or whatever its character. Among these relations some few perhaps--or, it may be, even none--realize for a longer or shorter time, with more or less completeness, that ultimate ident.i.ty in diversity, that 'me in thee'

which we call love; the rest comprise various degrees of attraction and repulsion, hatred, contempt, indifference, toleration, respect, sympathy, and so on; and all together, always changing, dissolving, and combining anew, weave about us, as they cross and intertwine, the shifting, restless web we call life. Now these relations are an effect and result of the pursuit of Good; but they are never the final goal of that pursuit. The goal, I think, would be a perfect union of all with all; and is not attained by anything that falls short of this, whether the defect be in depth or In extent. And that is how it is that love itself, even in its richer phases, and still more in those which are merely light and sensual, though, as I think, through it alone can we form our truest conception of Good, yet, as we have it, never is the Good, even if it appear to be so for the moment; for those who seek Good, I believe, will never feel that they have found it merely in union with one other person. For what love gains in intension it is apt to lose in extension; so that in practice it may even come to frustrate the very end it seeks, limiting instead of expanding, narrowing just in proportion as it deepens, and, by causing the disruption of all other ties, impoverishing the natures it should have enriched. Or don't you think that this happens sometimes, for instance in married life?"

"I do indeed."

"And, on the other hand," I continued, "it may very well be that one who pa.s.ses through life without attaining the fruition of love, yet with his gaze always set upon it, in and through many other connections, may yet come closer to the end of his seeking than one who, having known love, has sunk to rest in it then and there, as though he had come already to his journey's end, when really he has only reached an inn upon the road. So that I am far from thinking, as you pretended to suppose, that the boy and girl on the village green realize then and there the consummation of the world."

"Still," he objected, "I do not see, in the scheme you put forward, what place is left for the common business of life--for the things which really do, for the most part, occupy and possess men's minds, and the more, in my opinion, the greater their force and capacity."

"You mean, I suppose, war and politics, and such things as that?

"Yes, and generally all that one calls business."

"Well," I said, "what these things mean to those who pursue them, I am not as competent as you to say. But surely, what they are in essence is just, like most other activities, relations between human beings--relations of command and obedience, of respect, admiration, antagonism, comradeship, infinitely complex, infinitely various, but still all of them strung, as it were, upon a single thread of pa.s.sion; all of them at tension to become something else; all pointing to the consummation which it is the nature of that which created them to seek, and all, in that sense, paradoxical as it may sound, only means to love."

"You don't repudiate such activities then?"

"How should I? I repudiate nothing. I am not trying to judge, but, if I could, to explain. It is the men of action, I suppose, who have the greatest extension of life, and sometimes, no doubt, the greatest intension too. But every man has to live his own way, according to his opportunities and capacity. Only, as I think myself, all are involved in the same scheme, and all are driven to the same consummation."

"A consummation in the clouds!"

"I do not know about that; but at any rate, and this is the important point, that which urges us to it is here and now. Everything is rooted in it. Our pleasures and pains alike, our longing and dissatisfaction, our restlessness never-to-be-quenched, our counting as nothing what has been attained in the pressing on to more, our lying down and rising up, our stumbling and recovering, whether we fail, as we call it, or succeed, whether we act or suffer, whether we hate or love, all that we are, all that we hope to be springs from the pa.s.sion for Good, and points, if we are right in our a.n.a.lysis, to love as its end."

Upon this Audubon broke out:--"That's all very well! But the one crucial point you persistently evade. It may be quite true, for aught I know, that the Good you describe is the Good we seek--though I am not aware of seeking it myself. But, after all, the real question is, Can we get it? If not, we are mere fools to seek it."

"So," I said, "you have brought me to bay at last! And, since you challenge me, I am bound to admit that I don't know whether we can get it or no."

"Well then," he said, impatiently, "what is the good of all this discussion?"

"Clearly," I replied, "no good at all, if there be no Good, which is the point to which you are always harking back. But you have surely forgotten the basis of our whole argument?"

"What basis?"

"Why, that from the very beginning we have been trying to find out, not so much what we know (for on that point I admit that we know little enough), as what it is necessary for us to believe, if we are to find significance in life."

"But how can we believe what we don't know?"

"Why," I replied, "we can surely adopt postulates, as indeed we always do in practical life. Every man who is about to undertake anything makes the a.s.sumption, in the first place, that it is worth doing, and In the second place that it is possible to be done. He may be wrong in both these a.s.sumptions, but without them he could not move a step. And so with regard to the business of life, as a whole, it is necessary to a.s.sume, if we are to make anything of it at all, both that there is Good, and that we know something about it; and also, I think, that it is somehow or other realizable; but I do not know that any of these a.s.sumptions could be proved."

"But what right have we, then, to make such a.s.sumptions?"

"We have none at all, so far as knowledge is concerned. Indeed, to my mind, it is necessary, if we are to be honest with ourselves, that we should never forget that they are a.s.sumptions, so long as they have not received definite proof. But still they are, I think, as I said, a.s.sumptions we are bound to make, if we are to give any meaning to life. We might perhaps call them 'postulates of the will'; and our att.i.tude, when we adopt them, that of faith."

"Faith!" protested Wilson, "that is a dangerous word!"

"It is," I agreed. "Yet I doubt whether we can dispense with it.

Only we must remember that to have 'faith' in a proposition is not to affirm that it is true, but to live as we should do if it were. It is, in fact, an att.i.tude of the will, not of the understanding; the att.i.tude of the general going into battle, not of the philosopher in his closet."

"But," he objected, "where we do not know, the proper att.i.tude is suspense of mind."

"In many matters, no doubt," I replied, "but surely not in those with which we are dealing. For we must live or die; and if we are to choose to do either, we must do so by virtue of some a.s.sumption about the Good."

"But why should we choose to do either? Why should not we simply wait?"

"But wait how? wait affirming or denying? active or pa.s.sive? Is it possible to wait without adopting an att.i.tude? Is not waiting itself an att.i.tude, an acting on the a.s.sumption that it is good to wait?"

"But, at any rate, it does not involve a.s.sumptions as large as those which you are trying to make us accept."

"I am not trying to make you do anything; I am only trying to discover what you make yourself do. And do you, as a matter of fact, really dispute the main conclusions to which we have come, or rather, if you will accept my phrase, the main 'postulates of the will' which we have elicited?"

"What are they? Let me have them again."

"Well," I said, "here they are. First, that Good has some meaning."

"Agreed!"

"Second, that we know something about that meaning."

"Doubtful!" said Dennis. "But it will be no use now to resume that controversy."

"No," I replied, "only I thought I had shown that if we know nothing about it, then, for us, it has no meaning; and so our first a.s.sumption is also destroyed, and with it all significance in life."