"Oh, they have! And how do you know that anyone has crossed over? You do not believe in the mortality nor the slumber of the soul; no more do I; but time exists only with life. A man dies and in the same instant opens his eyes upon eternity, and yet a million of years may have been swept away in that instant. As a tired child you have fallen asleep. A moment later you have been called by your mother to breakfast. And yet, in that moment of dreamless sleep, the long winter night had passed. Adam, the first man, closing his eyes in death; you and I, who will do the same ten, twenty, forty years hence, and the generations who will follow us for a million years, perhaps, will waken to eternity, if there be a waking, in one and the same instant of time, without a knowledge of the intervening years. There were no years. Eternity has no beginning, no end, no measurement."
He paused a moment, then suddenly burst out again.
"Nothing in life is real—it is all a dream. You think your being is reality and that you hear my voice speaking. I tell you it is but fancy. We are the figures—the mimes in some vast hypnotic exhibition—the shadows in some gigantic spirit's disordered dream. Hypnotism," he continued, pursuing a line of thought which his impulsive words had suggested, "has, in fact, proven that no one can distinguish the real from the unreal. You remember, when we went to see Flint, the great hypnotist, how his subjects passed from one condition to another and took on any personality at the operator's will; capering and grimacing about the stage with all the characteristics and even the facial expression of monkeys, one minute, and simpering as silly school-girls the next; and to them it was all real—as real as this room, these bodies, these pictures are to us. I read some lines once that seemed to express the idea:
"I sometimes think life but a dream
Of some great soul in some great sphere,
And what appear as truths but seem,
And what seem truths do but appear."
He repeated these words with slow earnestness, adding solemnly, "Who knows? Who knows?"
The man who sat listening drew a long breath. He was a rich idler with a good deal of worldly wisdom, but he loved and admired his erratic friend. He felt that much of what he said was sophistry, wholly or in part; but there was a charm about the earnest manner, the musical voice, and the flashing brevity of statement, more pleasing to his ear than sounder logic from a surer reasoner.
It was nearly dark now in the studio. The artist halted in his march, and offered to light the gas.
"Not for the world, Julian; I am far too happy in the dark. I was just thinking what a glorious agitator you would make; you would carry all before you. I wonder you have never dabbled in politics or socialism. Now I think of it, I have never heard you mention these things. I suppose you belong to one or the other of the great parties, however."
"Politics? Party? Good heavens, no! I never meddle with such things; it is one step lower than I have ever gone."
"But a man must stand somewhere. He that stands nowhere stands upon nothing."