mind can
produce a pathologic process like a blister, it can also remove warts
or cancer, as the hypnotists of the Charcot school claim. If the mind
can move a book or a pencil without the intervention of any known form
of matter, then Clarke (as well as his psychic) may be innocent, and
all that happened last night be due to thought-transference and
telekinesis."

The young man shrugged his shoulders. "To admit a single one of your
premises would turn all our science upside down."

Weissmann smiled musingly. "So said the Ptolmaic philosophers when
Copernicus came. Yet nothing was destroyed but error--they established
the truth."

"I didn't mean what I said, exactly. I meant that the whole theory is
opposed to every known law of physics."

"I'm not so certain of that, I can imagine a subtler form of force
than magnetism. I can imagine the mind reacting upon matter, creating
in its own right by the displacement and rearrangement of the
molecules of a substance--say of wood. What is a wine-glass but an
appearance? No, no! It will not do to be dogmatic. We must not assume
too much. We must keep open minds. Are we not advancing? Is any one
nearing the farther wall? No, my boy, each year should make us less
arrogant. Ten thousand years from now men will still be discovering
new laws of nature just as they were ten thousand years ago. It is
childish to suppose that we or any other generation will know all that
is to be known. Infinite research is before us just as infinite
painful groping is behind us. I do not assume to say what the future
will bring to mankind. Perhaps soon--very soon, science will shift its
entire battle-line from matter to mind. To say the mind is conditioned
in a certain way to-day does not mean that these conditions may not
utterly change to-morrow. Great discoveries wait in the future."

"But you would not say that a new way of squaring the circle would
appear--or that perpetual motion--"

"Oh no, no! Error is not a product of enlightenment. I only say that
the problem which is insoluble to you and to me may be quite simple to
the biologist of the twenty-second century. Once I thought I might
come to know much of the universe, now I am quite certain I shall
never know but a few processes--never the mystery itself."

As the old man talked with the light of prophecy in his gaunt face,
the young man's imagination took wing into the future, that mighty and
alluring void, black as night, yet teemi