e, calm, and rather contemptuous reply to his question.
In place of decision he encountered a doubt, a hesitancy, which
betrayed weakness. Rudolph Weissmann, great as he was, belonged to the
innumerable throng of the bereaved whose judgments are clouded by
passion. He, too, was growing old, his all-embracing mind had yielded
to an hallucination.

The young man's respect for his chief did not diminish, but a feeling
of sadness swept over him as he realized that another renowned and
fearless investigator was nearing the end of his great usefulness, and
that upon the clear blue steel of his intelligence the rust of age had
begun to fall. Truly the power of his early training, his worship of
Kant and his school was still vital.

Then he pondered his words. "If I were a young man like you I would
investigate this thing," and recalled that no young man of science had
ever devoted himself to it. "They all came to it late in life, after
bereavement."

The bereaved! The whole stupendous delusion seemed to rest upon the
overmastering desire of the bereaved for their beloved. The great and
good men and women among the believers (he was willing to admit there
were such) came to investigation weakened by sorrow, made illogical by
loss. They put their sane judgment, their strength, their calm
patience aside and grasped eagerly at the lying comfort extended to
them. They were not merely deceived, they developed fraud by their
blindness, by their hunger for consolation, and by their crass
credulity. He was still young enough to have inexorable theories--to
be of single-hearted loyalty to his creed. To him as a monist, the
soul (as an entity apart from the body) did not exist. Consciousness
was a physical disturbance of the higher nerve centres, and thought a
secretion of the brain. He acknowledged no line of demarcation between
the crystal and the monera--and no chasm (of course) between man and
the animals. The universe was a unit--and all its forms and forces
differentiations of one substance and that substance too mysterious to
be analyzed or named. In such a philosophy as this there could be no
room for any hypothesis which even so much as squinted towards
dualism, or that permitted a conception so childish as the persistence
of the individuality after death.

However, he did not carry his implacable principles into the homes of
his friends, and seldom permitted them to interfere with his enjoyment
of wines or good dinners, th