Christina Alberta was greatly elated at her successful repulse of his projected cross-examination. Instead of making a display herself she could watch him. She watched him over the flowers on the table and had to be nudged by the waiter when he brought the pheasant to her elbow. “How should one begin?” he plunged. She had heard of Pragmatism? Yes. She was probably better read in that sort of thing than he was. He was, he considered, a sort of Pragmatist. Most modern-minded, intelligent people he held were Pragmatists as he understood it. Pragmatist? As he understood it? He met her eye and explained. In this sense he meant it; we, none of us, had a clear vision of reality; nobody perhaps would ever do more than approach reality. What we perceived was just that much of reality that got through to us, through our very defective powers of interpretation. “They’ve done this pheasant en casserole very well,” he broke off. “Three minutes’ truce we ought to give it. Do you find I’m talking comprehensibly? I doubt it.”
“I’m hanging on,” said Christina Alberta....
“Perhaps I’m beginning rather too far off.”
Pheasant....
“To come back to my confession of faith,” he said presently.... “Mind you, Christina Alberta, you’ve got to say your bit afterwards.”
“It won’t be as definite as yours,” she said. “Some of yours I shall steal. But go on—telling me.”
“Well, keep hold, Christina Alberta. I feel I’m going to be at once hesitating and condensed. And I’m not sure of what you know or don’t know. If I say I’m an Agnostic about the nature of the universe, and how it began and where it ends, does that convey anything to you?”
“Just what I think,” said Christina Alberta.
“Well.” He started afresh and got into parenthetical difficulties. The Pêche Melba came to interrupt and permit a fresh start. He unfolded a psychologist’s vision of the world for her inspection, a curious and yet attractive vision to her. He expressed himself in terms of mind and understanding. She was used to hearing everything expressed in terms of labour and material necessity. Life, he said, was one continuous thing, all life was connected. He tried to illustrate that. The conscious life of most lower animals was intensely individual, a lizard, for example, was just itself, just its instincts and appetites; it received no teaching and no tradition, it handed on nothing to its kind. But the higher animals were taught when they were young, learnt and taught others and communicated with each other. Men far more than any animal. He had developed picture-writing, speech, oral tradition, scientific record. There was now a common mind of the race, a great growing body of knowledge and interpretations.
“People like ourselves are just cross-sections of that flow. Individually we receive it, react to it, change it a little, and pass away. We are just passing phases of that increasing mind—which may be for all we can certainly say, an immortal mind. Does this sound like Greek—or nonsense to you?”