“Here’s fresh meat for your axe, Kreis,” he said; “a rose-white
youth with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer. Make a
Haeckelite of him – if you can.”
Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic
thing, while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet,
girlish smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.
Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered,
until he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle. Martin
listened and fain would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible
that this should be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market.
The books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and
enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen
drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the
philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical
demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with
warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features
worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in, and all
followed the discussion with cigarettes going out in their hands
and with alert, intent faces.
Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now
received at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical
plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed
missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a
metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as
metaphysicians. PHENOMENON and NOUMENON were bandied back and
forth. They charged him with attempting to explain consciousness
by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery, with reasoning from
words to theory instead of from facts to theory. At this they were
aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of reasoning to
start with facts and to give names to the facts.
When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded
him that all good little German philosophies when they died went to
Oxford. A little later Norton reminded them of Hamilton’s Law of
Parsimony, the application of which they immediately claimed for
every reasoning process of theirs. And Martin hugged his knees and
exulted in it all. But Norton was no Spencerian, and he, too,
strove for Martin’s philosophic soul, talking as much at him as to
his two opponents.
“You know Berkeley has never been answered,” he said, looking
directly at Martin. “Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was
not very near. Even the stanchest of Spencer’s followers will not
go farther. I was reading an essay of Saleeby’s the other day, and
the best Saleeby could say was that Herbert Spencer NEARLY
succeeded in answering Berkeley.”
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208
“You know what Hume said?” Hamilton asked. Norton nodded, but
Hamilton gave it for the benefit of the rest. “He said that
Berkeley’s arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction.”
“In his, Hume’s, mind,” was the reply. “And Hume’s mind was the
same as yours, with this difference: he was wise enough to admit
there was no answering Berkeley.”
Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head,
while Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages,
seeking out tender places to prod and poke. As the evening grew
late, Norton, smarting under the repeated charges of being a
metaphysician, clutching his chair to keep from jumping to his
feet, his gray eyes snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and
sure, made a grand attack upon their position.
“All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but,
pray, how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you
unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are
always lugging about into places it has no right to be. Long
before the school of materialistic monism arose, the ground was
removed so that there could be no foundation. Locke was the man,
John Locke. Two hundred years ago – more than that, even in his
‘Essay concerning the Human Understanding,’ he proved the non-
existence of innate ideas. The best of it is that that is
precisely what you claim. To-night, again and again, you have
asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.
“And what does that mean? It means that you can never know
ultimate reality. Your brains are empty when you are born.
Appearances, or phenomena, are all the content your minds can
receive from your five senses. Then noumena, which are not in your
minds when you are born, have no way of getting in – ”
“I deny – ” Kreis started to interrupt.
“You wait till I’m done,” Norton shouted. “You can know only that
much of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in
one way or another on our senses. You see, I am willing to admit,
for the sake of the argument, that matter exists; and what I am
about to do is to efface you by your own argument. I can’t do it
any other way, for you are both congenitally unable to understand a
philosophic abstraction.”
“And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own
positive science? You know it only by its phenomena, its
appearances. You are aware only of its changes, or of such changes
in it as cause changes in your consciousness. Positive science
deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to
be ontologists and to deal with noumena. Yet, by the very
definition of positive science, science is concerned only with
appearances. As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot
transcend phenomena.”
“You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and
yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm
that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the
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209
point, the existence of matter. – You know I granted the reality of
matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your
understanding. Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology
has no place in positive science, so leave it alone. Spencer is
right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer – ”
But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and
Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and
Kreis and Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds
as soon as he finished.
“You have given me a glimpse of fairyland,” Martin said on the
ferry-boat. “It makes life worth while to meet people like that.
My mind is all worked up. I never appreciated idealism before.
Yet I can’t accept it. I know that I shall always be a realist. I
am so made, I guess. But I’d like to have made a reply to Kreis
and Hamilton, and I think I’d have had a word or two for Norton. I
didn’t see that Spencer was damaged any. I’m as excited as a child
on its first visit to the circus. I see I must read up some more.
I’m going to get hold of Saleeby. I still think Spencer is
unassailable, and next time I’m going to take a hand myself.”
But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his
chin buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body
wrapped in the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the
propellers.
CHAPTER XXXVII
The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to
Brissenden’s advice and command. “The Shame of the Sun” he wrapped
and mailed to THE ACROPOLIS. He believed he could find magazine
publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines
would commend him to the book-publishing houses. “Ephemera” he
likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden’s
prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with
him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print. He did
not intend, however, to publish it without the other’s permission.
His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and,
thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden for consent.
Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a
number of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him
with its insistent clamor to be created. Apparently it was to be a
rattling sea story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and
romance, handling real characters, in a real world, under real
conditions. But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be
something else – something that the superficial reader would never
discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way
the interest and enjoyment for such a reader. It was this, and not
the mere story, that impelled Martin to write it. For that matter,
it was always the great, universal motif that suggested plots to
him. After having found such a motif, he cast about for the