"'Once I have thus settled the Antecedents, I will proceed to His life. In accordance with the method of zoologists and biologists, to whom one fox is as good as another, and one rabbit as serviceable as another, I will study the daily life of a modern rabbi in Sichem, or Jerusalem.
"'I will measure his nose, his lips, the width and height of his mouth when yawning and when asleep, his weight, his rapidity of walk, the loudness of his voice, his pulse, his heart, his meals, and his drinks. This will give me valuable data for the life of Jesus. I will reduce all these data to finely-drawn statistical tables.
"'As soon as I shall be in possession of these tables I will attack the most important part of my work: I will not tire until I discover the microbe which imparted to all that Jesus said an extraordinary power of captivation. That microbe, I have no doubt, can be distilled from a comparative solution of Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Mahomet and Jesus. I name it microbus prophetizans Huxleyi. I shall, I trust, isolate it and send specimens to the South Kensington Museum, I will——'
"When the white-haired one," said Socrates, "had arrived at that stage of his wanderings, I left the hall. I felt sea-sick. These little ones think that they can triangulate the human personality, because they have triangulated many of their countries. They never consider that triangulation, and all scientific methods, refer, and can refer only to quantity or material quality. There is no geometry of love, hatred, or spiritual power. It is the old error of the Pythagoreans which you, O Pythagoras, admitted to me after having whiled in Olympus for a few hundred years.
"Numbers are not the souls of things.
"Personality is the soul of things.
"We humans are pre-eminently creative. Our chief force is not intellect nor will-power. We are neither Hegelians nor Schopenhauerians. In point of sagacity many an animal transcends us; and did you not avow to me, O Leibniz, that the difference between you and a yokel is not so much in your being more intellectual, or in your having more brain-power, but in your having more creative power?
"Intellect, or the force of close thinking, may be found in abundance in the city of London. Had people devoted as keen an interest to science or philosophy as city men do to money transactions, we should be much further than we are.
"But people differ very much less in power of intellect than in strength of originality.