"If you do not believe in tacks, will you believe in the touch of your fingers?"
"If she permits me to hold her and the cone moves I will surrender."
"No, you won't. You think you will, but you won't. Don't deceive yourself. I've been all through it. You can't believe until some fundamental change takes place in your mind. You must struggle just as Richet did."
"Anyhow, let's turn the screws tighter. Let's devise some other plan to make ourselves doubly certain of her part in the performance."
With this understanding I said good-night, and took my lonely way to my apartment.
It was deliciously fresh and weirdly still in the street, and as I looked up at the glowing stars and down the long, empty street my mind revolted. "Can it be that the good old theory of the permanence of matter is a gross and childish thing? Do the dead tell tales, after all? I wish I could believe it. Perhaps old Tontonava was right. Perhaps if we were all to pray for the happy hunting-grounds at the same moment and in perfect faith, the lost paradise would return builded by the simple power of our thought."
Then Richet's moving confession came to me: "It took me twenty years of patient research to arrive at my present conviction. Nay (to make one last confession), I am not yet absolutely and irremediably convinced. In spite of the astounding phenomena which I have witnessed, I have still a trace of doubt—doubt which is weak, indeed, to-day, but which may, perchance, be stronger to-morrow. Yet such doubts, if they come, will not be due so much to any defect in the actual experiment as to the inexorable strength of prepossession which holds me back from adopting a conclusion which contravenes the habitual and almost unanimous opinion of mankind."