ities which have enforced a humbleness that is not
good for my happiness nor conducive to my development. Henceforward I
will espouse the cause of vanity. It is only the vain who deprecate
vanity in others.

But there were times in the early period of my association with Victor
Stott when I rebelled vigorously against his complacent assumption of my
ignorance.

II

May was a gloriously fine month, and we were much out of doors.
Unfortunately, except for one fortnight in August, that was all the
settled weather we had that summer.

I remember sitting one afternoon staring at the same pond that Ginger
Stott had stared at when he told me that the boy now beside me was a
"blarsted freak."

The Wonder had said nothing that day, but now he began to enunciate some
of his incomprehensible commonplaces in that thin, clear voice of his. I
wrote down what I could remember of his utterances when I went home, but
now I read them over again I am exceedingly doubtful whether I reported
him correctly. There is, however, one dictum which seems clearly
phrased, and when I recall the scene, I remember trying to push the
induction he had started. The pronouncement, as I have it written, is as
follows:

"Pure deduction from a single premiss, unaided by previous knowledge of
the functions of the terms used in the expansion of the argument, is an
act of creation, incontrovertible, and outside the scope of human
reasoning."

I believe he meant to say--but my notes are horribly confused--that
logic and philosophy were only relative, being dependent always in a
greater or less degree upon the test of a material experiment for
verification.

Here, as always, I find the Wonder's pronouncements very elusive. In one
sense I see that what I have quoted here is a self-evident proposition,
but I have the feeling that behind it there lies some gleam of wisdom
which throws a faint light on the profound problem of existence.

I remember that in my own feeble way I tried to analyse this statement,
and for a time I thought I had grasped one significant aspect of it. It
seemed to me that the possibility of conceiving a philosophy that was
not dependent for verification upon material experiment--that is to say,
upon evidence afforded by the five senses--indicates that there is
something which is not matter; but that since the development of such a
philosophy is not possible to our minds, we must argue that our
dependence upon matter is so intim