NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 21 



in that class financially, or who consider themselves 

 too refined for that kind of relief seek a new 

 sensation in speculating why that brute old world 

 out there will not stand for what you call spiritual 

 and ideal values for short, your egotisms. 



The fact is that the whole discussion is only a 

 symptom of the leisure class disease. If you had 

 to work to the limit and beyond, to keep soul and 

 body together, and, more than that, to keep alive 

 the soul of your family in its body, you would 

 know the difference between your artificial prob 

 lems and the genuine problem of life. Your philo 

 sophic problems about the relation of &quot; the uni 

 verse to moral and spiritual good &quot; exist only in 

 the sentimej^alism that generates them. The gen 

 uine question is why social arrangements will not 

 permit the amply sufficient body of natural re 

 sources to sustain all men and women in security 

 and decent comfort, with a margin for the culti 

 vation of their human instincts of sociability, love 

 of knowledge and of art. 



As I read Plato, philosophy began with some 

 sense of its essentially political basis and mission 

 a recognition that its problems were those of the 

 organization of a just social order. But it soon 

 got lost in dreams of another world ; and even those 

 of you philosophers who pride yourselves on being 

 so advanced that you no longer believe in &quot; an 

 other world,&quot; are still living and thinking with 



