“I pull them down to truth,” panted Prothero.
“Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and discipline and training some sort of falsity!”
“Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.”
For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
“I'm not talking of Love,” he said, remaining persistently outrageous. “I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically possible....
“But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?”
“Then why don't we up and find out?” said Billy.
He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? “What is the wisdom of the ages?” said Prothero. “Think of the corners where that wisdom was born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic....”
“Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?” protested Benham.