ttle ink left. I wish he
would not write so much. It is disconcerting.

* * * * *

There was one thing upon which Jim and I were not quite agreed. He
believed in the eternity of the forms of things. Therefore, entered in
immediately the consequent belief in immortality, and all the other
notions of the metaphysical philosophers. I had little patience with him
in this. Painstakingly I have traced to him the evolution of his belief
in the eternity of forms, showing him how it has arisen out of his early
infatuation with logic and mathematics. Of course, from that warped,
squinting, abstract view-point, it is very easy to believe in the
eternity of forms.

I laughed at the unseen world. Only the real was real, I contended, and
what one did not perceive, was not, could not be. I believed in a
mechanical universe. Chemistry and physics explained everything. "Can no
being be?" he demanded in reply. I said that his question was but the
major promise of a fallacious Christian Science syllogism. Oh, believe
me, I know my logic, too. But he was very stubborn. I never had any
patience with philosophic idealists.

* * * * *

Once, I made to him my confession of faith. It was simple, brief,
unanswerable. Even as I write it now I know that it is unanswerable.
Here it is. I told him: "I assert, with Hobbes, that it is impossible to
separate thought from matter that thinks. I assert, with Bacon, that all
human understanding arises from the world of sensations. I assert, with
Locke, that all human ideas are due to the functions of the senses. I
assert, with Kant, the mechanical origin of the universe, and that
creation is a natural and historical process. I assert, with Laplace,
that there is no need of the hypothesis of a creator. And, finally, I
assert, because of all the foregoing, that form is ephemeral. Form
passes. Therefore we pass."

I repeat, it was unanswerable. Yet did he answer with Paley's notorious
fallacy of the watch. Also, he talked about radium, and all but asserted
that the very existence of matter had been exploded by these later-day
laboratory researches. It was childish. I had not dreamed he could be so
immature.

How could one argue with such a man? I then asserted the reasonableness
of all that is. To this he agreed, reserving, however, one exception. He
looked at me, as he said it, in a way I could not mistake. The inference
was obvious. That