"Naturally! Had you believed half you say you were told of me, you would have known I must have seen it. Can you wonder that I refuse to be 'drawn'?"
He looked at me with an odd expression of mingled surprise and annoyance, and I met his gaze fully and frankly. His eyes shifted uneasily away from mine.
"One may feel a pardonable curiosity," he said, "And a desire to know—"
"To know what?" I asked, with some warmth—"How can you obtain what you are secretly craving for, if you persist in denying what is true? You are afraid of death—yet you invite it by ignoring the source of life! The curtain is down,—you are outside eternal realities altogether in a chaos of your own voluntary creation!"
I spoke with some passion, and he heard me patiently.
"Let us try to understand each other," he said, after a pause—"though it will be difficult. You speak of 'eternal realities.' To me there are none, save the constant scattering and re-uniting of atoms. These, so far as we know of the extraordinary (and to me quite unintelligent) plan of the Universe, are for ever shifting and changing into various forms and clusters of forms, such as solar systems, planets, comets, star-dust and the like. Our present view of them is chiefly based on the researches of Larmor and Thomson of Cambridge. From them and other scientists we learn that electricity exists in small particles which we can in a manner see in the 'cathode' rays,—and these particles are called 'electrons.' These compose 'atoms of matter.' Well!—there are a trillion of atoms in each granule of dust,—while electrons are so much smaller, that a hundred thousand of them can lie in the diameter of an atom. I know all this,—but I do not know why the atoms or electrons should exist at all, nor what cause there should be for their constant and often violent state of movement. They apparently always HAVE BEEN, and always WILL be,—therefore they are all that can be called 'eternal realities.' Sir Norman Lockyer tells us that the matter of the Universe is undergoing a continuous process of evolution—but even if it is so, what is that to me individually? It neither helps nor consoles me for being one infinitesimal spark in the general conflagration. Now you believe—"
"In the Force that is BEHIND your system of electrons and atoms"—I said—"For by whatever means or substances the Universe is composed, a mighty Intelligence governs it—and I look to the Cause more than the Effect. For even I am a part of the whole,—I belong to the source of the stream as much as to the stream itself. An abstract, lifeless principle without will or intention or intelligence could not have evolved the splendours of Nature or the intellectual capabilities of man—it could not have given rise to what was not in itself."
He fixed his eyes steadily upon me.
"That last sentence is sound argument," he said, as though reluctantly admitting the obvious,—"And I suppose I am to presume that 'Itself' is the well-spring from which you draw, or imagine you draw, your psychic force?"
"If I have any psychic force at all," I responded,—"where do you suppose it should come from but that which gives vitality to all animate Nature? I cannot understand why you blind yourself to the open and visible fact of a Divine Intelligence working in and through all things. If you could but acknowledge it and set yourself in tune with it you would find life a new and far more dominant joy than it is to you now. I firmly believe that your very illness has arisen from your determined attitude of unbelief."