l bank down in Red Gap will look on
it with uneducated eyes and think it's real. Philosophers have dug into
these matters and made 'em simple for us. It took thousands of books to
do it; but it's done at last. Everything is nothing. Ask any scientist;
he'll make it just as clear to you as a mist in a fog.

And even nothing itself ain't real. They go to that extreme. Not even
empty space is real. And the human mind can't comprehend infinite space.
I got kind of hot when one of 'em said that. I asked 'em right off
whether the human mind could comprehend space that had an end to it. Of
course it can't comprehend anything else but infinite space. I had 'em,
all right; they had to change the subject. So they switched over to free
will. None of us has it.

That made me hot again. I told 'em to try for even five minutes and see
if they could act as if they didn't have the power of choice. Of course
I had 'em again. Mebbe there ain't free will, but we can't act as if
there wasn't. Those two would certainly make the game of poker impossible
if folks believed 'em.

I nearly broke up the party that night. I said it was a shame young men
was being taught such stuff when they could just as well go to some good
agricultural college and learn about soils and crops and what to do in
case of a sick bull. Furthermore, I wanted to know what they would do to
earn their daily bread when they'd got everything dug up and labelled.
Pretty soon they'd have every last organic remains put into a catalogue,
the whole set complete and unbroken--and then what? They'd be out of a
job.

The Prof laughed and said let the future take care of itself. He said we
couldn't tell what might happen, because, as yet, we was nothing really
but supermonkeys. That's what he called our noble race--supermonkeys!
So I said yes; and these here philosophers that talked about subject and
object and the nothingness of nothing reminded me of monkeys that get
hold of a looking-glass and hold it up and look into it, and then sneak
one paw round behind the glass to catch the other monkey. So he laughed
again and said "Not bad, that!"

You could kid the Prof, which is more than I can say for Oswald. Oswald
always took a joke as if you'd made it beside the casket holding all that
was mortal of his dear mother. In the presence of lightsome talk poor
Oswald was just a chill. He was an eater of spoon-meat, and finicking.
He could talk like Half Hours With the World's Best Au