He drove home his question on a note of reproachful expostulation and sat down drawn together, with bent head and eye downcast, but listening intently with his serenely singing child’s brow. Miriam was instantly sorry that his words had got through, their naked definiteness changing the eloquent tone, sharpening it to a weapon, a borrowed weapon.
“That’s it” she breathed, hoping the lecturer’s answer would throw some light on the meaning of the fascinating phrase, floating before her, fresh from far-off philosophical battle-fields, bright from centuries of contemplation, flashing out now, to-day, in Europe triumphantly, in desperate encounters. The lecturer was on his feet, gleaming towards their centre of the audience his recognition of the clean thrust.
“The correlation between physical and mental gives an empirical support to materialism.” That couldn’t be spirited away. The scientists swore there was no break; so convincingly; perhaps they would yet win and prove it. “But it is necessary to distinguish between metaphysic and psychology. Psychology, like physical science, is to be put to the score of our knowledge of matter.”
“In which he doesn’t believe” scoffed Miriam, distractedly poised between Mr. Shatov’s drama and the prospect opening within her mind.
“I find this a most arbitrary statement.”
“Yes, rather” murmured Miriam emphatically, and waited for a moment as if travelling with him along his line of thought. But he was recovering, had recovered, did not seem to be dwelling or moving in any relation to what he had said, appeared to be disinterestedly listening to the next question.
“Besides” she said, “the empirical method is a most important method, and jolly” .....
“Poor chap; what a stupidity is this question.” Miriam smiled solicitously, but she had travelled back enraptured across nine years to the day, now only yesterday, of her first meeting with her newly recovered word. Jevons. From the first the sienna brown volume had been wonderful, the only one of the English books that had any connection with life; and that day, Sunday afternoon prep in the dining-room, with the laburnum and pink may outside the window changing as she read from a tantalising reproach to a vivid encirclement of her being by all the spring scenes she had lived through, coming and going, the sight and scent and shimmering movement of them, as if she moved, bodiless and expanded, about in their midst. Something about the singing, lifting word appearing suddenly on the page, even before she had grasped its meaning, intensified the relation to life of the little hard motionless book, leaving it, when she had read on, centred round the one statement; the rest remaining in shadow, interesting but in some strange way ill-gotten.
The recovery of the forgotten word at the centre of “the philosophical problems of the present day” cast a fresh glow of reality across her schooldays. The efforts she had so blindly made, so indolently and prodigally sacrificing her chances of success in the last examination, to the few things that had made the world shine about her, had been in some way right, with a shapeliness and fruitfulness of their own. Her struggles with Jevons had been bread cast upon the waters ...... how differently the word now fell into her mind, with “intuition” happily at home there to keep it company. If materialism could be supported empirically, there was something in it, something in matter that had not yet been found out...... Meantime philosophy proved God. And Hegel had not brushed away the landscape. There was God and the landscape.
“Materialism isn’t dead yet” she heard herself say recklessly.