"O.K., what do we do?"
"I must discover the reason for the split personality."
"I can give you that reason. The engineer was forced into being a practical man because money lies in that direction. Upon getting out of college, there was a heavy debt. It was paid off by hard work—a habit formed and never broken. Bad habits, you know, are hard to break."
"Interesting."
"Well, the desire to delve into the physicist's realm stayed with the engineer, but people who had heavy purses were not interested in new ways to measure the ether-drift or the effect of cosmic radiation on the physical properties of carbon. Money wants more perfect pencil sharpeners, ways of automatically shelling peas, and efficient methods of de-gassing oil. All these things are merely applications in practice of phenomena that some physicist has uncovered and revealed and put on record so that some engineer can use the effect to serve his ends.
"At any rate, the desire to be a physicist is strong, strong enough to cause schizophrenia. I, Dr. Hamilton, am a living, breathing, talking example that an engineer is but a frustrated physicist. He is the troubled one—I am the stable personality. I am happy, well-adjusted, and healthy."
"I see. Yet he has his point. You, like other physicists, are not interested in making money. How, then, do you propose to live?"
"A physicist—or an engineer—can always make out well. The bank account at the last sitting was something like ninety-four thousand, six hundred seventeen dollars and thirty-four cents."
"That's quite a lot of money."
"The engineer considers it a business backlog," said Thomas. "Equipment is costly. Ergo—see?"