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Admiral. 'Yet now I come to think of it,' he went on, 'one of them, the Scotchman, is not a parson at all, but a professor of moral philosophy, to be delivered to Port Mahon, where presumably they are in need of his services. Moral philosophy. How does that differ from your kind, Stephen?'
       'Why, natural philosophy is not concerned with ethics, virtues and vices, or metaphysics. The fact that the dodo has a keel to her breastbone whereas the ostrich and her kind have none presents no moral issue; nor does the dissolution of gold by aqua regia. We erect hypotheses, to be sure, some of us to a most stupendous height, but we always hope to sustain them by demonstrable facts in time: these are not the province of the moralist. Perhaps it might be said that your moral philosopher is in pursuit of wisdom rather than of knowledge; and indeed what he is concerned with is not so much the object of knowledge as of intuitive perception—is scarcely susceptible of being known. Yet whether wisdom can be any more profitably pursued than happiness is a question. Certainly the few moral philosophers I have known do not seem to have been outstandingly successful in either, whereas some natural philosophers, such as Sir Humphrey Davy . . .' Stephen carried on to the end of his long, his very long sentence, but a great while before he stopped it was apparent to him that Captain Aubrey was meditating a joke.
       'So I suppose,' he said, smiling so broadly that his blue eyes were not more than twinkling slits in his red face, 'that you and Sir Humphrey could be described as immoral philosophers?'
       'Sure there may be some poor thin barren minds that would catch at such a paltry clench,' said Stephen. 'Pothouse wits that might, if their beery genius soared so high, also call Professor Graham an unnatural philosopher.'
       Captain Aubrey heaved silently for a while—few men relished their own wit more than Jack—and then, smiling still, he said, 'Well, at all events, I hope he is good company. I can imagine an unnatural and an immoral philosopher arguing the toss for hours, to the admiration of all hands, ha, ha, ha.'
       'We have barely exchanged a dozen words; he seems a reserved gentleman, and perhaps a little deaf. I have hardly formed any opinion of him; though he must be widely read, sure, to occupy a chair in a respectable university. I believe I have seen his name to a recent edition of the Nicomachean Ethics.'
       'And what of the others, the parsons proper?'
       Ordinarily they did not exchange their views about Stephen's fellow-members of the wardroom mess; Jack, for example, had not said a word about his extreme displeasure at the arrival of Mr Somers rather than either of the lieutenants he had applied for, nor of his intimate conviction that the young man had been in Plymouth for several days, reporting aboard only when the hard labour of fitting the Worcester for sea was done. But the parsons were no part of the ship's company; they were passengers; they might be discussed, and Stephen described them briefly. One was a West Country rector, an invalid who hoped to find health in the Mediterranean, where his cousin commanded the Andromache . 'I wish he may get there, at all: such a cachexy I have rarely seen ambulant'—all the others were unbeneficed clergymen: two had been ushers in schools for young gentlemen, and thought any other life preferable to that, even on shipboard; two had tried long and hard and unsuccessfully to live by their pens—they were pitifully thin and shabby—and one, from the West Indies, had ruined himself by the invention of a double-bottomed defecator. 'It appears that the machine, which is designed to purify sugar, requires only the investment of a little more capital to sweep the board; and that any gentleman with a few hundreds to spare might set up his coach on the profits within a very short space of time. But come, joy, are we ever to attack Scarlatti, the poor soul, or are we to