“No offence, Sir Eliphaz! If you don’t want me to talk I won’t; but if you do, then I must say what I have in my mind. And as I say, I don’t hold you responsible for the things you have been saying. All this cheap medium stuff has been shot upon the world by Sir Oliver J. Lodge, handed out by him to people distraught with grief, in a great fat impressive-looking volume.... No end of them have tried their utmost to take it seriously.... It’s been a pitiful business.... I’ve no doubt the man is honest after his lights, but what lights they are! Obstinate credulity posing as liberalism. He takes every pretence and dodge of these mediums, he accepts their explanations, he edits their babble and rearranges it to make it seem striking. Look at his critical ability! Because many of the mediums are fairly respectable people who either make no money by their—revelations, or at most a very ordinary living—it’s a guinea a go, I believe, usually—he insists upon their honesty. That’s his key blunder. Any doctor could tell him, as I could have told him after my first year’s practice, that telling the truth is the very last triumph of the human mind. Hardly any of my patients tell the truth—ever. It isn’t only that they haven’t a tithe of the critical ability and detachment necessary, they haven’t any real desire to tell the truth. They want to produce effects. Human beings are artistic still; they aren’t beginning to be scientific. Either they minimize or they exaggerate. We all do. If I saw a cat run over outside and I came in here to tell you about it, I should certainly touch up the story, make it more dramatic, hurt the cat more, make the dray bigger and so on. I should want to justify my telling the story. Put a woman in that chair there, tell her to close her eyes and feel odd, and she’ll feel odd right enough; tell her to produce words and sentences that she finds in her head and she’ll produce them; give her half a hint that it comes from eastern Asia and the stuff will begin to correspond to her ideas of pigeon English. It isn’t that she is cunningly and elaborately deceiving you. It is that she wants to come up to your expectation. You are focussing your interest on her, and all human beings like to have interest focussed on them, so long as it isn’t too hostile. She’ll cling to that interest all she knows how. She’ll cling instinctively. Most of these mediums never held the attention of a roomful of people in their lives until they found out this way of doing it.... What can you expect?”
Dr. Barrack cleared his throat. “But all that’s beside the question,” he said. “Don’t think that because I reject all this spook stuff, I’m setting up any finality for the science we have to-day. It’s just a little weak squirt of knowledge—all the science in the world. I grant you there may be forces, I would almost say there must be forces in the world, forces universally present, of which we still know nothing. Take the case of electricity. What did men know of electricity in the days of Gilbert? Practically nothing. In the early Neolithic age I doubt if any men had ever noticed there was such a thing as air. I grant you that most things are still unknown. Things perhaps right under our noses. But that doesn’t help the case of Sir Eliphaz one little bit. These unknown things, as they become known, will join on to the things we do know. They’ll complicate or perhaps simplify our ideas, but they won’t contradict our general ideas. They’ll be things in the system. They won’t get you out of the grip of the arguments Mr. Huss has brought forward. So far, so far as concerns your Immortality, Sir Eliphaz, I am, you see, entirely with Mr. Huss. It’s a fancy; it’s a dream. As a fancy it’s about as pretty as creaking boards at bedtime; as a dream—. It’s unattractive. As Mr. Huss has said.
“But when it comes to Mr. Huss and his Immortality then I find myself with you, gentlemen. That too is a dream. Less than a dream. Less even than a fancy; it’s a play on words. Here is this Undying Flame, this Spirit of God in man; it’s in him, he says, it’s in you, Sir Eliphaz, it’s in you, Mr.—Dad, wasn’t it? it’s in this other gentleman whose name I didn’t quite catch; and it’s in me. Well, it’s extraordinary that none of us know of it except Mr. Huss. How you feel about it I don’t know, but personally I object to being made part of God and one with Mr. Huss without my consent in this way. I prefer to remain myself. That may be egotism, but I am by nature an egotistical creature. And Agnostic....
“You’ve got me talking now, and I may as well go through with it. What is an Agnostic really? A man who accepts fully the limitations of the human intelligence, who takes the world as he finds it, and who takes himself as he finds himself and declines to go further. There may be other universes and dimensions galore. There may be a fourth dimension, for example, and, if you like, a fifth dimension and a sixth dimension and any number of other dimensions. They don’t concern me. I live in this universe and in three dimensions, and I have no more interest in all these other universes and dimensions than a bug under the wallpaper has in the deep, deep sea. Possibly there are bugs under the wallpaper with a kind of reasoned consciousness of the existence of the deep, deep sea, and a half belief that when at last the Keating’s powder gets them, thither they will go. I—if I may have one more go at the image—just live under the wallpaper....
“I am an Agnostic, I say. I have had my eyes pretty well open at the universe since I came into it six and thirty years ago. And not only have I never seen nor heard of nor smelt nor touched a ghost or spirit, Sir Eliphaz, but I have never seen a gleam or sign of this Providence, the Great God of the World of yours, or of this other minor and modern God that Mr. Huss has taken up. In the hearts of men I have found malformations, ossifications, clots, and fatty degeneration; but never a God.
“You will excuse me if I speak plainly to you, gentlemen, but this gentleman, whose name I haven’t somehow got—”
“Farr.”
“Mr. Farr, has brought it down on himself and you. He called me in, and I am interested in these questions. It’s clear to me that since we exist there’s something in all this. But what it is I’m convinced I haven’t the ganglia even to begin to understand. I decline either the wild guesses of the Spookist and Providentialist—I must put you there, I’m afraid, Sir Eliphaz—or the metaphors of Mr. Huss. Fact....”
Dr. Barrack paused. “I put my faith in Fact.”
“There’s a lot in Fact,” said Mr. Dad, who found much that was congenial in the doctor’s downright style.