IX
JESSICA TO PHILIP
My dear Mr. Towers:
Many thanks for this copy of your book, The Forest Philosophers of India. I have just finished reading it, and now I understand you better. Your sense of reality has been destroyed by this mysticism of the East. The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lost that, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminations which you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of a Nirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, a whisper out of your long eternity. And I confess that to me the impression of a man not being at home in his own body is nothing short of terrifying.
You were not expecting so fierce a criticism of your own book from one of your own reviewers, I suspect. Ah, but your “Three Commands” have laid me under a spell. I cannot say anything about them without saying too much; and I am a little rebellious.
X
JESSICA TO PHILIP
My dear Mr. Towers:
I have not replied earlier to your letter on the problem of consciousness, because I was waiting to read Dr. Minot’s article. At last I got hold of the magazine, and so far from finding your comments “a tangle of crude ideas,” they have even proved suggestive—perhaps not in the way you expected. For following your line of thought, I wondered if it could have been some violent death-rate among our own species that has produced that desperate phenomenon, the literary consciousness of the historical novelist I have been reviewing for you. And, come to think of it, I do not know any other class of people whose problem of consciousness could be so readily reduced to a “bionomical” platitude. They all write for the same slaying purpose. Did you ever observe how few of their characters survive the ordeals of art? Usually it is the long-lost heroine, and the hero, “wounded unto death” however, and one has the impression that even these would not have lived so long but for the necessity of the final page.
But I must not fail to tell you of a dramatic episode in connection with my first venture into the realm of biological thought. The Popular Science Monthly has long been proscribed at the parsonage on account of its heretical tendencies. And my purpose was to keep a profound secret the fact that I had purchased a copy containing Minot’s article. But some demon prompted me to inquire of my father the meaning of the term “epiphenomenon.” Now a long association with the idea of omniscience has rendered him wiser in consciousness than in fact, which is a joke the imagination often plays upon serious people. But he could neither give a definition nor find the word in his ancient Webster. This dictionary is his only unquestioned authority outside the Holy Scriptures, and he declines to accept any word not vouched for by this venerable authority. Therefore he reasoned that “epiphenomenon” had been built up to accommodate some modern theory of thought, some new leprosy of the mind never dreamed of by the noble lexicographer. And so, fixing me with a pair of accusing glasses, he inquired: