For some few minutes they walked in silence; Challis with his head down, his heavy shoulders humped. His hands were clasped behind him, dragging his stick as it were a tail, which he occasionally cocked. He walked with a little stumble now and again, his eyes on the ground. Lewes strode with a sure foot, his head up, and he slashed at the tangle of last year’s growth on the bank whenever he passed some tempting butt for the sword-play of his stick.
“Do you think, then,” said Challis at last, “that much of the atmosphere—you must have marked the atmosphere—of the child’s personality, was a creation of our own minds, due to our preconceptions?”
“Yes, I think so,” Lewes replied, a touch of defiance in his tone.
“Isn’t that what you want to believe?” asked Challis.
Lewes hit at a flag of dead bracken and missed. “You mean...?” he prevaricated.
“I mean that that is a much stronger influence than any preconception, my dear Lewes. I’m no pragmatist, as you know; but there can be no doubt that with the majority of us the wish to believe a thing is true constitutes the truth of that thing for us. And that is, in my opinion, the wrong attitude for either scientist or philosopher. Now, in the case we are discussing, I suppose, at bottom I should like to agree with you. One does not like to feel that a child of four and a half has greater intellectual powers than oneself. Candidly, I do not like it at all.”
“Of course not! But I can’t think that——”
“You can if you try; you would at once if you wished to,” returned Challis, anticipating the completion of Lewes’s sentence.
“I’ll admit that there are some remarkable facts in the case of this child,” said Lewes, “but I do not see why we should, as yet, take the whole proposition for granted.”
“No! I am with you there,” returned Challis. And no more was said until they were nearly home.