“But Peek is far from being a benighted nigger,” replied Barnwell; “he can read and write as well as you can; he is the best shot in the county; he is a good mechanic; for a time he waited on one of the great jugglers at the St. Charles; he can explain or cleverly imitate all the tricks of all the conjurers; he is not a man to be humbugged, especially by a poor sick girl in a hut with no cellar, no apparatus, no rooms where any coadjutor could hide. It has been the greatest puzzle of my life to know how to explain Peek’s stories.”
“Half that is extraordinary in them,” said the Professor, “is probably a lie, and the other half is delusion. Not one man in fifty is competent to test such occurrences. Men’s senses have not been scientifically trained; their love of the marvellous blinds them to the simplest solutions of a mystery. How to observe is one of the most difficult of arts; and one must undergo rigid scientific culture in the practical branches before he can observe properly.”
“Under your theory, Professor, ninety-eight men out of every hundred ought to be excluded as witnesses from our courts of justice. It strikes me that a fellow like Peek—with his senses always in good working trim, who never misses his aim, who can hit a mark by moonlight at forty paces, and shoot a bird on the wing in bright noonday, who can detect a tread or a flutter of wings when to your ear all is silence—is as competent to see straight and judge of sights and sounds as any blinkard from a college, even though he wear spectacles and call himself professor of mathematics. Remember, Peek is not a superstitious nigger. He will feel personally obliged to any ghost who will show himself. He shrinks from no haunted room, no solitude, no darkness.”
“Truly, Horace, you speak as if you half believed these absurdities.”
“No,—I wish I could. Peek once said to me, that he wouldn’t have believed these things on my testimony, and couldn’t expect me to believe them on his.”
“Our business,” said the Professor, “is with the life before us. I agree with Comte, that we ought to confine ourselves to positive, demonstrable facts; with Humboldt, that ‘there is not much to boast of after our dissolution,’ and that ‘the blue regions on the other side of the grave’[[9]] are probably a poet’s dream. Let us not trouble ourselves about the inexplicable or the uncertain.”
“But you do not consider, Professor, that Peek’s facts are positive to his experience. Besides, to say, with Comte, that a fact is inexplicable, and that we can’t go beyond it, is not to demonstrate that the fact has its cause in itself; it is merely to confess the mystery of a cause unknown.”[[10]]
“Well, Horace, I’m sleepy, and must retire. I’ll find an opportunity to cross-examine Peek before I go, and you shall see how he will contradict and stultify himself.”
Before the opportunity was found, the Professor had passed on. Less modest than Rabelais was in his last moments, he did not condescend to say, “I go to inquire into a great possibility.” The physician in attendance, who was a young man, and had recently “experienced religion,” asked the Professor if he had found the Lord Jesus. To which the Professor, making a wry face, replied, “Jargon!” “Have you no regard for your soul?” asked the well-meaning doctor. “Can you prove to me, young man, that I have a soul?” returned the Professor, trying to raise himself on his pillow, in an argumentative posture. “Don’t you believe in a future state?” asked the doctor. “I believe what can be proved,” said the Professor; “and there are two things, and only two, that can be proved,—though Berkeley thinks we can’t prove even those,—matter and motion.[[11]] All phenomena are reducible to matter and motion,—matter and motion,—matter and mo-o-o—”
The effort was too much for the moribund Professor. He did not complete the utterance of his formula, at least on this side of the great curtain. Probably when he awoke in the next life, conscious of his identity, he felt very much in the mood of that other man of science, who, on being told that the microscope would confute an elaborate theory he had raised, refused to look through the impertinent instrument.