‘You are pleased to keep on joking,’ said Pigasov. ‘Of course that’s very original, but it’s not to the point.’
‘In what I have said hitherto,’ rejoined Rudin, ‘there is, unfortunately, too little that’s original. All that has been well known a very long time, and has been said a thousand times. That is not the pith of the matter.’
‘What is then?’ asked Pigasov, not without insolence.
In discussions he always first bantered his opponent, then grew cross, and finally sulked and was silent.
‘Here it is,’ continued Rudin. ‘I cannot help, I own, feeling sincere regret when I hear sensible people attack——’
‘Systems?’ interposed Pigasov.
‘Yes, with your leave, even systems. What frightens you so much in that word? Every system is founded on a knowledge of fundamental laws, the principles of life——’
‘But there is no knowing them, no discovering them.’
‘One minute. Doubtless they are not easy for every one to get at, and to make mistakes is natural to man. However, you will certainly agree with me that Newton, for example, discovered some at least of these fundamental laws? He was a genius, we grant you; but the grandeur of the discoveries of genius is that they become the heritage of all. The effort to discover universal principles in the multiplicity of phenomena is one of the radical characteristics of human thought, and all our civilisation——’
‘That’s what you’re driving at!’ Pigasov broke in in a drawling tone. ‘I am a practical man and all these metaphysical subtleties I don’t enter into and don’t want to enter into.’