," concluded Hitt, "the physical senses give us no information
whatsoever of a real physical universe about us."

"And so," added Father Waite, "we come back to Carmen's statement,
namely, that seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling are
mental processes, in no way dependent upon the outer fleshly organs of
sense--"

"Nonsense!" interjected Haynerd. "Why is it, then, that if the eyes
are destroyed we do not see?"

"Simply, my friend, because of human belief," replied Hitt. "The human
mind has been trained for untold centuries to dependence upon beliefs
in the reality of matter, and beliefs in its dependence upon material
modes for sight, hearing, touch, and so on. It is because of its
erroneous beliefs that the human mind is to-day enslaved by matter,
and dependent upon it for its very sense of existence. The human mind
has made its sense of sight dependent upon a frail, pulpy bit of
flesh, the eye. As long as that fleshly organ remains intact, the
human mind sees its sense of sight externalized in the positing of its
mental concepts about it as natural objects. But let that fleshly eye
be destroyed, and the human mind sees its belief of dependence upon
the material eye externalized as blindness. When the fleshly eye is
gone the mind declares that it can no longer see. And what it declares
as truth, as fact, becomes externalized to it. I repeat, the human
mind sees and hears only its thoughts, its beliefs. And holding to
these beliefs, and making them real to itself, it eventually sees them
externalized in what it calls its outer world, its environment, its
universe. And yet, the materialistic scientists themselves show that
the human mind can take no cognizance whatever through the five
physical senses of the all-pervading basis of its very existence, the
ether. And the ether--alas! it is but a theory which we find necessary
for any intelligible explanation of the farce of human existence on a
material basis."

"Now see here!" retorted Haynerd, rising and giving expression to his
protest by means of emphatic gestures. "I'm getting mixed--badly! You
tell me that the existence of things demands a creator, and I admit
it, for there can be no effect without a cause. Then you say that the
universe is infinite; and I admit that, too, for the science of
astronomy finds no limits to space, and no space unoccupied. You say
that the unity manifested in the universe proves that there can be but
one creator. Moreover,