«I don't suppose Mother's kept up with the Levys much,» was the next importunate train of thought. «Dad always hated self-made people and wouldn't have 'em at Denver. And old Gerald keeps up the tradition. I wonder if she knew Freke well in those days. She seems to get on with Milligan. I trust Mother's judgment a good deal. She was a brick about that bazaar business. I ought to have warned her. She said something once — »
He pursued an elusive memory for some minutes, till it vanished altogether with a mocking flicker of the tail. He returned to his reading.
Presently another thought crossed his mind, aroused by a photograph of some experiment in surgery.
«If the evidence of Freke and that man Watts hadn't been so positive,» he said to himself, «I should be inclined to look into the matter of those shreds of lint on the chimney.»
He considered this, shook his head and read with determination.
Mind and matter were one thing, that was the theme of the physiologist. Matter could erupt, as it were, into ideas. You could carve passions in the brain with a knife. You could get rid of imagination with drugs and cure an outworn convention like a disease. «The knowledge of good and evil is an observed phenomenon, attendant upon a certain condition of the brain-cells, which is removable.» That was one phrase; and again:
«Conscience in man may, in fact, be compared to the sting of a hive-bee, which, so far from conducing to the welfare of its possessor, cannot function, even in a single instance, without occasioning its death. The survival-value in each case is thus purely social; and if humanity ever passes from its present phase of social development into that of a higher individualism, as some of our philosophers have ventured to speculate, we may suppose that this interesting mental phenomenon may gradually cease to appear; just as the nerves and muscles which once controlled the movements of our ears and scalps have, in all save a few backward individuals, become atrophied and of interest only to the physiologist.»
«By Jove!» thought Lord Peter, idly, «that's an ideal doctrine for the criminal. A man who believed that would never —»
And then it happened — the thing he had been half-unconsciously expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably as sunrise. He remembered — not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical succession of things, but everything — the whole thing, perfect, complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to think about it. He knew it.
There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and is required to make a word out of them, as thus: