NATURE S GOOD: A CONVERSATION 29 



all Being is on the other side of experience, and all 

 experience is seeming. 



Grimes. I think I heard you mention history. 

 I wish both of you would drop dialectics and go 

 to history. You would find history to be a strug 

 gle for existence for bread, for a roof, for pro 

 tected and nourished offspring. You would find 

 history a picture of the masses always going 

 under just missing in the struggle, because 

 others have captured the control of natural re 

 sources, which in themselves, if not as benign as 

 the eighteenth century imagined, are at least abun 

 dantly ample for the needs of all. But because of 

 the monopolization of Nature by a few persons, 

 most men and women only stick their heads above 

 the welter just enough to catch a glimpse of better 

 things, then to be shoved down and under. The 

 only problem of the relation of Nature to human 

 good which is real is the economic problem of the 

 exploitation of natural resources in the equal in 

 terests of all, instead of in the unequal interests 

 of a class. The problem you two men are discuss 

 ing has no existence and never had any outside 

 of the heads of a few metaphysicians. The latter 

 would never have amounted to anything, would 

 never have had any career at all, had not shrewd 

 monopolists or tyrants (with the skill that charac 

 terizes them) have seen that these speculations 

 about reality and a transcendental world could be 



