Reuben drank a little, remembering the afternoon. He had spent at least two hours by the pond with Mr. Welland—listening mostly, for once launched the doctor spoke well, like one whose talk had been dammed up a long time: Harvey, Sydenham, a surgeon named Paré, Signor Malpighi again and his little frog, something of a book named Micrographia by a Robert Hooke of England. The time had gone quickly; Mr. Welland was still talking as they crossed the south pasture and climbed the slope, and from the top of it Reuben could see the tiny figures of Ben and Uncle John returning, but the doctor at first was not able to make them out. "My eyes are not what they were," he said, "though maybe I can peer a little way through a stone wall." With that remark Mr. Welland had become somewhat remote, like a man interrupted in conversation by a distant call, though all he did was stand there, his ugly, kindly face turned away from the path of the late lowering sun.
John Kenny asked: "And what is truth?"
"We must recognize divers degrees of truth," said Gideon Hibbs. "There is the empirical, observational truth I mentioned. There is logical truth, demonstrated by proceeding correctly from the premise. There is ethical truth, not demonstrable by observation or logic, deriving from an ideal harmony between the human will and the will of God."
"There I begin to lose you," said John Kenny.
"Ideal, sir, attainable in perfection only by the mind, not in common life because man is the plaything of chance, a conclusion to which I am forced, in defiance of prevailing theology, by contemplation of human frailty and the vicissitudes of life." Mr. Hibbs drank and looked a trifle happier. "Above all there is metaphysical truth, even further beyond the reach of observation and logic. Here indeed the philosopher may find consolation—by submission, if you like, to the incomprehensible."
"But in what manner is mind not a part of common life?"
"Oh? Sir, do you doubt the separateness of soul and body?"
"I confess that sometimes I do." Uncle John looked tired, Reuben saw, as though he might have lost interest in Socratic method, might even prefer to be playing chess. He enjoyed it most with Ben, Reuben knew; when Reuben himself entered the dry brilliant world of the chessboard he found it nearly impossible to temper his own sharp skill, and victory came with too much ease. He wondered if the doctor could be a chess-player. Strange, the remoteness like a sadness that had come over Mr. Welland there at the top of the rise. "If you run, Reuben, you can meet them in front of the house." That had been like a mind reading. "I don't run nowadays, Reuben." He recalled the doctor's brief mirthless smile as they shook hands. "I think I'd admire to see you run. I'll take the path through this other field—it'll bring me out back of my own house.... Run, boy, run!"
He had missed a part of something Uncle John was saying concerning the influence on the human spirit of every change suffered by the flesh. The old man was speaking of youth and age. It was all reasonable and wise, Reuben thought. Uncle John was seldom anything but reasonable and wise. "I think truth may be both a humbler and a sterner thing. I think, Mr. Hibbs, there can never be any truth but a partial truth, subject to change by every new observation."
"But that is...."