and
irregularly, and stops at last for some reason that the most skilful
inspection cannot discover. The body of him who dies, as we say, 'by
efflux of time' at the age of fifty is as perfect as it was at
five-and twenty. [8] Yet few men live to be fifty-five, [9] and most
have ceased to take much interest in practical life, or even in
science, by forty-five." [10]

"That seems strange," I said. "If no foreign body gets into the
machinery, and the machinery itself does not wear out, it is difficult
to understand why the clock should cease to go."

"Would not some of your race," he asked, "explain the mystery by
suggesting that the human frame is not a clock, but contains, and owes
its life to, an essence beyond the reach of the scalpel, the
microscope, and the laboratory?"

"They hold that it is so. But then it is not the soul but the body
that is worn out in seventy or eighty of the Earth's revolutions."

"Ay," he said; "but if man were such a duplex being, it might be that
the wearing out of the body was necessary, and had been adapted to
release the soul when it had completed its appropriate term of service
in the flesh."

I could not answer this question, and he did not pursue the theme.
Presently I inquired, "If you allow no appeal to popular feeling or
passion, to what was I so nearly the victim? And what is the terrorism
that makes it dangerous to avow a credulity or incredulity opposed to
received opinion?"

"Scientific controversies," he replied, "enlist our strongest and
angriest feelings. It is held that only wickedness or lunacy can
resist the evidence that has convinced a vast majority. By
arithmetical calculation the chances that twelve men are wrong and
twelve thousand [11] right, on a matter of inductive or deductive
proof, are found to amount to what must be taken for practical
certainty; and when the twelve still hold out, they are regarded as
madmen or knaves, and treated accordingly by their fellows. If it be
thought desirable to invoke a legal settlement of the issue, a council
of all the overseers of our scientific colleges is called, and its
decision is by law irrevocable and infallible, especially if ratified
by the popular voice. And if a majority vote be worth anything at all,
I think this modern theory at least as sound as the democratic theory
of politics which prevailed here before the Communistic revolution,
and which seems by your account to be gaining ground on Earth."

"And wh