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Title: The Philosopher's Joke

Author: Jerome K. Jerome

Posting Date: July 26, 2008 [EBook #868]
Release Date: April 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Ron Burkey, and Amy Thomte

THE PHILOSOPHER'S JOKE

By Jerome K. Jerome

Author of "Paul Kelver," "Three Men in a Boat," etc., etc.

New York

Dodd, Mead & Company

1909

Copyright, 1904, By Jerome K. Jerome

Copyright, 1908, By Dodd, Mead & Company

Published, September, 1908

Myself, I do not believe this story. Six persons are persuaded of its
truth; and the hope of these six is to convince themselves it was an
hallucination. Their difficulty is there are six of them. Each one alone
perceives clearly that it never could have been. Unfortunately, they are
close friends, and cannot get away from one another; and when they meet
and look into each other's eyes the thing takes shape again.

The one who told it to me, and who immediately wished he had not,
was Armitage. He told it to me one night when he and I were the only
occupants of the Club smoking-room. His telling me--as he explained
afterwards--was an impulse of the moment. Sense of the thing had been
pressing upon him all that day with unusual persistence; and the
idea had occurred to him, on my entering the room, that the flippant
scepticism with which an essentially commonplace mind like my own--he
used the words in no offensive sense--would be sure to regard the affair
might help to direct his own attention to its more absurd aspect. I
am inclined to think it did. He thanked me for dismissing his entire
narrative as the delusion of a disordered brain, and begged me not to
mention the matter to another living soul. I promised; and I may as well
here observe that I do not call this mentioning the matter. Armitage
is not the man's real name; it does not even begin with an A. You might
read this story and dine next to him the same evening: you would know
nothing.

Also, of course, I did not consider myself debarred from speaking about
it, discre