The casual doubt aroused strange emotions in Stover.
"I thought you didn't believe in them," he said slowly.
"I don't. I don't believe in organizations, institutions, traditions—that's my point of view," said Brockhurst. "But then I'm in the world to be in revolt."
"You once spoke of the society system—the whole thing as it exists in America—" said Stover, "as a sort of idol worship. I never quite understood your meaning."
"Why, I think it's quite obvious," said Brockhurst surprised. "What was idol worship? A large body of privileged charlatans, calling themselves priests, impressed the masses with all the flummery of mysterious ceremonies, convenient voices issuing from caves or stone idols. What was an idol? An ordinary chunk of marble, let us say, issuing from the sculptor's chisel. When did it become sacred and awe-inspiring? When it had been placed in an inner shrine of shrines, removed from the public, veiled in shadows, obscured by incense, guarded by solicitous guards; the stone is still a stone but the populace is convinced. Look into a well in daylight—commonplace; look into it at night—a great mystery; black is never empty, the imagination fills it."
"How does this apply?" said Stover, impatiently.
"Cases are parallel. A group of us come together for the purpose of debate and discussion; no one notices it beyond a casual thought. Suddenly we surround ourselves with mystery, appear on the campus with a sensational pin stuck in our cravats, a bat's head or a gallows, and when, marvellously enough, some one asks us what the dickens we are wearing, we turn away; instantly it becomes known that something so deadly secret has begun that we have sworn to shed our heart's blood before we allow the holy, sacred name of Bat's Head or Gallow's Bird to pass our lips!"
"It's a little foolish, but what's the harm?"
"The harm is that this mumbo-jumbo, fee-fi-fo-fum, high cockalorum business is taken seriously. It's the effect on the young imagination that comes here that is harmful. Dink, I tell you, and I mean it solemnly, that when a boy comes here to Yale, or any other American college, and gets the flummery in his system, believes in it—surrenders to it—so that he trembles in the shadow of a tomblike building, doesn't dare to look at a pin that stares him in the face, is afraid to pronounce the holy, sacred names; when he's got to that point he has ceased to think, and no amount of college life is going to revive him. That's the worst thing about it all, this mental subjection which the average man undergoes here when he comes up against all this rigmarole of Tap Day, gloomy society halls, marching home at night, et cetera—et ceteray. By George, it is a return of the old idol-worship idea—thinking men in this twentieth century being impressed by the same methods that kept nations in servitude to charlatans three thousand years before. It's wrong, fundamentally wrong—it's a crime against the whole moving spirit of university history—the history of a struggle for the liberation of the human mind."