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Page 16
* * * * *
And yet, explain one thing. To-day, before going for my walk, I
carefully put the fountain pen in my pocket before leaving the room. I
remember it distinctly. I looked at the clock at the time. It was twenty
minutes past ten. Yet on my return there was the pen lying on the desk.
Some one had been using it. There was very little ink left. I wish he
would not write so much. It is disconcerting.
* * * * *
There was one thing upon which Jim and I were not quite agreed. He
believed in the eternity of the forms of things. Therefore, entered in
immediately the consequent belief in immortality, and all the other
notions of the metaphysical philosophers. I had little patience with him
in this. Painstakingly I have traced to him the evolution of his belief
in the eternity of forms, showing him how it has arisen out of his early
infatuation with logic and mathematics. Of course, from that warped,
squinting, abstract view-point, it is very easy to believe in the
eternity of forms.
I laughed at the unseen world. Only the real was real, I contended, and
what one did not perceive, was not, could not be. I believed in a
mechanical universe. Chemistry and physics explained everything. "Can no
being be?" he demanded in reply. I said that his question was but the
major promise of a fallacious Christian Science syllogism. Oh, believe
me, I know my logic, too. But he was very stubborn. I never had any
patience with philosophic idealists.
* * * * *
Once, I made to him my confession of faith. It was simple, brief,
unanswerable. Even as I write it now I know that it is unanswerable.
Here it is. I told him: "I assert, with Hobbes, that it is impossible to
separate thought from matter that thinks. I assert, with Bacon, that all
human understanding arises from the world of sensations. I assert, with
Locke, that all human ideas are due to the functions of the senses. I
assert, with Kant, the mechanical origin of the universe, and that
creation is a natural and historical process. I assert, with Laplace,
that there is no need of the hypothesis of a creator. And, finally, I
assert, because of all the foregoing, that form is ephemeral. Form
passes. Therefore we pass."
I repeat, it was unanswerable. Yet did he answer with Paley's notorious
fallacy of the watch. Also, he talked about radium, and all but asserted
that the very existence of matter had been exploded by these later-day
laboratory researches. It was childish. I had not dreamed he could be so
immature.
How could one argue with such a man? I then asserted the reasonableness
of all that is. To this he agreed, reserving, however, one exception. He
looked at me, as he said it, in a way I could not mistake. The inference
was obvious. That he should be guilty of so cheap a quip in the midst of
a serious discussion, astounded me.
* * * * *
The eternity of forms. It is ridiculous. Yet is there a strange magic in
the words. If it be true, then has he not ceased to exist. Then does he
exist. This is impossible.
* * * * *
I have ceased exercising. As long as I remain in the room, the
hallucination does not bother me. But when I return to the room after an
absence, he is always there, sitting at the desk, writing. Yet I dare
not confide in a physician. I must fight this out by myself.
* * * * *
He grows more importunate. To-day, consulting a book on the shelf, I
turned and found him again in the chair. This is the first time he has
dared do this in my presence. Nevertheless, by looking at him steadily
and sternly for several minutes, I compelled him to vanish. This proves
my contention. He does not exist. If he were an eternal form I could not
make him vanish by a mere effort of my will.
* * * * *
This is getting damnable. To-day I gazed at him for an entire hour
before I could make him leave. Yet it is so simple. What I see is a
memory picture. For twenty years I was accustomed to seeing him there at
the desk. The present phenomenon is merely a recrudescence of that
memory picture--a picture which was impressed countless times on my
consciousness.
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