“We’re very much alike, dogs and us. The skeletons are strikingly similar—don’t you think—especially when you set them up on end. Oh, we’re near cousins! But I’m really mongrel. I go here and there. I have no fixed home. I attach myself to all sorts of persons, and—alas!—leave them for other persons. Like the mongrel, I go where my spirit moves me.”
“You really are a sort of Quaker.”
“Oh, I am very sensitive to the call of the Spirit—I spell it with a capital because I believe we’re all part of the same mysterious Impulse—I spell that with a capital, too. We’re like good microbes in the blood, working out our selfish ends, but all for the unknown glory of something greater of which we are the unconscious molecules.”
She accused him of being a pantheist. He admitted it. Then she labelled him an old-school Presbyterian, but he admitted that.
“The main point in the old Bluestocking,” he explained, “is that as God had arranged it all, why worry? They didn’t always stick to the main point, because they were artistic creatures and loved the sensation of startling pictures—infants broiling for ever in hell, and the elect, who had done their darndest on earth, safe in heaven be-harped and be-winged with the fright of the pit still in their faces. But their main point is unassailable. You can’t argue it away. Predestination? Why not? We are observers, merely: it is only an allusion that we act. I have no more choice in going along with you to ‘Red Jacket’ than I have in liking you immensely or being a biped or sitting on this trunk.”
“Oh, we can do some things of our own free will.”
“Name one.”
“We can do what we want to do, certainly.”
“That’s all.”
“Don’t you ever do something you don’t want to do?”