"But is that the way to win?" asked the doctor. "We've all heard about catching flies with molasses, to use a homely simile."
"Yes," responded Silvia; "the more molasses the more flies. No, the old methods are gone or are going. Do you suppose anything would do the suffrage cause as much good in this country as clubbing a few old women who want respectfully to present a petition to the other old women in Congress? A few years ago a petition was presented, signed by a million women, and a jocose member rolled it down the aisle with his foot, saying it might as well be signed by mice! But just let them try the English methods and every State in the Union would enfranchise its women just as soon as they could get a popular vote on it." She stopped short. "Oh, I beg your pardon, doctor, I didn't mean to give you a suffrage lecture."
"You are not," he said. "At least, what I understand is that you are trying to make me see that, the spirit of the age is the militant spirit, that does not wait to have its own presented to it, but takes it wherever it finds it." She nodded and he went on: "I think that is true, but with this difference between the illustration you cite and the case in point. You women must be passionate enthusiasts to win, because the thing you want is concrete and imminent and personal. I have no intention of setting up as a vade mecum, founding a new cult, proselyting or even preaching my own doctrines; in the first place I shall change them as I discover better ones, or when they fail to bring results, and in the second I shall be too busy practicing my theories to find time to exploit them."
"There you are wrong," said his sister. "When a man like Jenner comes along that is the time for practicing, but when smallpox has been rooted out and tuberculosis forgotten, men will still read what Socrates had to say of immortality and the sermon on the mount. When you hear people belittle the written and the spoken Word, it becomes us to remember that 'In the beginning the Word was God,' and all that we know of past civilizations is the word they have left behind, painted on their stony walls or burned in a brick to say, 'After me cometh a builder. Tell him I too have known.'"
"But, my dear sister," Jack answered, "don't you think assuming the rôle of the teacher may be just a trifle, only a trifle, presumptuous on my part?"
"I don't quite know what your new views are," she answered.
"They are not new," he said. "In fact they are most of them of such hoary antiquity that they are lost in the mists that brooded over the face of the deep. It is only the application that is new. Even that has always been understood by certain great souls. Pythagoras is said to have taught the Greeks to believe in metempsychosis for the purpose of making them kinder to lesser forms of life; like many beauty worshipers they were frankly inhuman, and it took heroic measures to create even a glimmering perception of the unity of life which is the basis of all the great world religions, whether it be Buddha's 'Who hurteth another hurteth himself,' or Christ's commandment, 'Love one another'; the Yogi looking first at the prince and then at the pauper and saying, 'I am that,' or Father Damien going into voluntary exile for the sake of the souls of the wretched lepers. The Prince of Peace preached the doctrine of spiritual inspiration, and the King of Conquerors said 'Imagination rules the world.' Jesus or Napoleon—both knew that back of the visible man himself is the thought of the man, which controls him, and other men through him, if it possesses power and vitality and truth."
"Then it is a kind of new thought?" asked Hilda.
"Rather a renaissance of old thought. The modern quest of the Grail is not for the crystal cup that held the holy elements, but for the divine life itself, the principle that inspires men to action. The philosopher of our day is not a hermit, theorizing about vague abstractions, but vitally alive to the problems that confront this day and generation, and modern psychology is changing all the methods of the great processes of existence. Education, medicine, law, are all in process of transformation. Grandsons of the men who denounced Mesmer as a charlatan thronged the clinics of Charcot."
"Yes," said Silvia, "and within the next decade Münsterberg will have compelled a complete remodeling of our forms of legal procedure. No attorney worth his salt would undertake to ignore the apparatus devised by the psychologist, and the time is nearly gone by when, as he says, courts will prefer to listen to the 'science' of the handwriting experts, rather than permit the examination of a witness by methods in accord with the exact work of the psychologist."