Hamilton went on eagerly, often incoherently, while McCall nodded his head in approval.
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you talk like that,” he put in. “What’s happened to you?”
Hamilton pondered. “I suppose I’ve been coming to it gradually—and without realizing it. You know how those things go. You advocate an idea and then for the sake of consistency you keep advocating it.”
“Yes, I understand. It’s what I always call ‘mental inertia.’”
“Mental or moral inertia, that’s it. The inertia that one has to overcome in order to change an opinion—the subconscious prejudices and reactions, the fear of being thought inconsistent, all that. When I first learned that the universe had not been created in seven days—that is, seven days of twenty-four hours each—I fought against it. I didn’t want to believe it. A rational being would obviously weigh the facts coldly and dispassionately and then arrive at a conclusion. But it took me a long time to accept the fact that the earth is millions of years old.”
“Oh, that’s the way with all new ideas,” McCall fished a cigarette box out of his pocket, passed it over to Hamilton and selected a cigarette himself. “Hand me the matches. Nobody wants a new idea, until it’s forced on him, including, of course, Christianity. The man with a new idea—whether it’s a new religious philosophy, a new system of government, a new way of painting, a new way of writing, a new invention—is hooted down in the church, the school or the market-place. About the best thing that can happen to any innovator is to die of hunger in an attic. You know that old saw about building a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door. Emerson was all wrong. Now if you take a standard, common, ordinary mouse trap and open a stand on Fifth Avenue and Broadway or on State and Madison Streets and advertise Hamilton Mouse Traps consistently, you will get the world to use them. But, believe me, if you retreat to a wood and spend twenty years in studying the weaknesses of mice and inventing an entirely new trap for their ensnarement, you will stick in that same wood until travelers find your body devoured by the squirrels. Nobody will buy your better mouse trap. Why? Simply because it’s a different kind of mouse trap than anyone has used before—unless you spend time and effort showing him that it is better.”
“Yes, I suppose we’re all like that. We hate change. Our engineers study means of reducing friction, overcoming inertia, when the most important inertia is in our minds.”
They paused and remained silent for a moment, puffing reflectively on their cigarettes.
“I’ll tell you what has set me thinking,” said Hamilton at length, laying his cigarette down. “No, thanks, no more. Some one I met in Paris. Of course, all this time, all these two years, my ideas had been changing gradually. Did you ever study physics? You know how it is when you have a salt in solution and you try to crystallize it; you have the proper solution, the temperature is correct, but nothing happens until you give it a little jar. I suppose that jar offsets some sort of inertia—the inertia of form.
“Well, my jar came by my contact with some one. All the time my ideas had been changing subconsciously. I had been piling up new impressions. But I still continued to reason along old lines. Then I came in contact with some one who had given up a life of—well, the sort of life I had planned—for one of service. I’ve always been an egoist. I’ve always sneered at reformers and idealists. But here was a person whose motives were so obviously different from anything I had ever encountered that my mind was jarred. I didn’t know it at the time. I wonder how many revelations are discovered after they actually take place? It sounds like a paradox.”