"Paul," went on his chief abruptly in a tone that dropped instinctively to a lower key—almost a touch of awe lay behind it—"you admit no deity, I know, but you admit purpose, design, intelligence."
"Well," replied the other patiently, long experience having taught him iron restraint, "it's a blundering, imperfect system, inadequately organized—if you care to call that intelligence. It's of an extremely intricate complexity. I admit that. Deity I consider an unnecessary assumption."
"The love and hate of atoms alone bowls you over," was the unexpected comment. "The word 'Laws' explains nothing. A machine obeys the laws, but intelligence conceived that machine—and a man repairs and keeps it going. Who—what—keeps the daisy going, the crystal, the creative thought in the imagination? An egg becomes a leaf-eating caterpillar, which in turn becomes a honey-eating butterfly with wings. A yolk turns into feathers. Is that accomplished without intelligence?"
"Ask our new patient," interrupted Devonham, wiping his glasses with unnecessary thoroughness.
"Which?"
Devonham startled, looked up without his glasses. It seemed the question made him uneasy. Putting the glasses on suddenly, he stared at his chief.
"I see what you mean, Edward," he said earnestly, his interest deeply captured. "Be careful. We know nothing, remember, nothing of life. Don't jump ahead like this or take your dreams for reality. We have our duty—in a case like this."
Fillery smiled, as though to convey that he remembered his promise.
"Humanity," he replied, "is a very small section of the universe. Compared to the minuter forms of life, which may be quite as important, if not more so, the human section is even negligible; while, compared to the possibility of greater forms——" He broke off abruptly. "As you say, Paul, we know nothing of life after all, do we? Nothing, less than nothing! We observe and classify a few results, that's all. We must beware of narrow prejudice, at any rate—you and I."
His eyes lost their light, his speech dried up, his ideas, dreams, speculations returned to him unrewarded, unexpressed. With natures in whom the subconscious never stirred, natures through whom its magical fires cast no faintest upward gleam, intercourse was ever sterile, unproductive. Such natures had no background. Even a fact, with them, was detached from its true big life, its full significance, its divine potentialities!...