“Certainly. How should you? Pain is not of your world; pain is impossible to you; you have never experienced a physical pain. Reduce that to a formula, a principle, and what have we?”
“What have we?”
“This: Things which are outside of our orbit--our own particular world--things which by our constitution and equipment we are unable to see, or feel, or otherwise experience--cannot be made comprehensible to us in words. There you have the whole thing in a nutshell. It is a principle, it is axiomatic, it is a law. Now do you understand?”
The gentle creature looked dazed, and for all result she was delivered of this vacant remark:
“What is axiomatic?”
She had missed the point. Necessarily she would. Yet her effort was success for me, for it was a vivid confirmation of the truth of what I had been saying. Axiomatic was for the present a thing outside of the world of her experience, therefore it had no meaning for her. I ignored her question and continued:
“What is fear?”
“Fear? I do not know.”
“Naturally. Why should you? You have not felt it, you cannot feel it, it does not belong in your world. With a hundred thousand words I should not be able to make you understand what fear is. How then am I to explain death to you? You have never seen it, it is foreign to your world, it is impossible to make the word mean anything to you, so far as I can see. In a way, it is a sleep----”
“Oh, I know what that is!”