第2章 I(2)

For instance: A moving body can never stop. Why? Why, because at every instant of time it must be going at a certain rate, so how can it ever get slower? Pooh!" He stopped. He had been gesticulating with one hand, which he now jammed wrathfully into his pocket.

The tutor must have derived great pleasure from his own smile, for he prolonged and deepened and variously modified it while his shiny little calculating eyes travelled from one to the other of his ruddy scholars.

He coughed, consulted his notes, and went through all the paces of superiority. "I can find nothing about a body's being unable to stop," said he, gently. "If logic makes no appeal to you, gentlemen--"

"Oh, bunch!" exclaimed the second tennis boy, in the slang of his period, which was the early eighties. "Look here. Color has no existence outside of our brain - that's the idea?"

The tutor bowed.

"And sound hasn't? and smell hasn't? and taste hasn't?"

The tutor had repeated his little bow after each.

"And that's because they depend on our senses? Very well. But he claims solidity and shape and distance do exist independently of us. If we all died, they'd he here just the same, though the others wouldn't. A flower would go on growing, but it would stop smelling. Very well. Now you tell me how we ascertain solidity. By the touch, don't we? Then, if there was nobody to touch an object, what then? Seems to me touch is just as much of a sense as your nose is." (He meant no personality, but the first boy choked a giggle as the speaker hotly followed up his thought.)" Seems to me by his reasoning that in a desert island there'd be nothing it all--smells or shapes--not even an island. Seems to me that's what you call logic."

The tutor directed his smile at the open window. "Berkeley--" said he.

"By Jove!" said the other boy, not heeding him, "and here's another point: if color is entirely in my brain, why don't that ink-bottle and this shirt look alike to me? They ought to. And why don't a Martini cocktail and a cup of coffee taste the same to my tongue?" "Berkeley," attempted the tutor, "demonstrates--"

"Do you mean to say," the boy rushed on, "that there is no eternal quality in all these things which when it meets my perceptions compels me to see differences?"

The tutor surveyed his notes. "I can discover no such suggestions here as you are pleased to make" said he. "But your orriginal researches," he continued most obsequiously, "recall our next subject,--Berkeley and the Idealists." And he smoothed out his notes.

"Let's see," said the second boy, pondering; "I went to two or three lectures about that time. Berkeley--Berkeley. Didn't he--oh, yes! he did. He went the whole hog. Nothing's anywhere except in your ideas.

You think the table's there, but it isn't. There isn't any table."

The first boy slapped his leg and lighted a cigarette. "I remember," said he. "Amounts to this: If I were to stop thinking about you, you'd evaporate."

"Which is balls," observed the second boy, judicially, again in the slang of his period, "and can be proved so. For you're not always thinking about me, and I've never evaporated once."

The first boy, after a slight wink at the second, addressed the tutor.

"Supposing you were to happen to forget yourself," said he to that sleek gentleman, "would you evaporate?"

The tutor turned his little eyes doubtfully upon the tennis boys, but answered, reciting the language of his notes: "The idealistic theory does not apply to the thinking ego, but to the world of external phenomena. The world exists in our conception of it.

"Then," said the second boy, "when a thing is inconceivable?"

"It has no existence," replied the tutor, complacently.

"But a billion dollars is inconceivable," retorted the boy. "No mind can take in a sum of that size; but it exists."

"Put that down! put that down!" shrieked the other boy. "You've struck something. If we get Berkeley on the paper, I'll run that in." He wrote rapidly, and then took a turn around the room, frowning as he walked. "The actuality of a thing," said he, summing his clever thoughts up, "is not disproved by its being inconceivable. Ideas alone depend upon thought for their existence. There! Anybody can get off stuff like that by the yard." He picked up a cork and a foot-rule, tossed the cork, and sent it flying out of the window with the foot-rule.

"Skip Berkeley," said the other boy.

"How much more is there?"

"Necessary and accidental truths," answered the tutor, reading the subjects from his notes. "Hume and the causal law. The duality, or multiplicity, of the ego."

"The hard-boiled ego," commented the boy the ruler; and he batted a swooping June-bug into space.

"Sit down, idiot," said his sprightly mate."

Conversation ceased. Instruction went forward. Their pencils worked.

The causal law, etc., went into their condensed notes like Liebig's extract of beef, and drops of perspiration continued to trickle from their matted hair.