"But you must remember," said Ellis, "that I have never admitted the
truth of that last statement."

"But," I said, "if you do not admit it generally--and generally, I
confess, I do not see how it could be proved or disproved, except by
an appeal to every individual's experience--do you not admit it in
your own case? Do you not find that, in choosing, you follow your idea
of what is good, so far as you can under the limitations of your own
passions and of external circumstances?"

"Well," he replied, "I wish to be candid, and I am ready to admit that
I do."

"And that you cannot conceive yourself as choosing otherwise? I mean
that if you had to abandon as a principle of choice your opinion about
Good, you would have nothing else to fall back upon?"

"No; I think in that case I should simply cease to choose."

"And can you conceive yourself doing that? Can you conceive yourself
living, as perhaps many men do, at random and haphazard, from moment
to moment, following blindly any impulse that may happen to turn
up, without any principle by which you might subordinate one to the
other?"

"No," he said, "I don't think I can."

"That, then," I said, "is what I meant, when I suggested that you, at
any rate, and I, and other people like us, are practically bound to