“I stand rebuked, sir.”
“You’ll learn that the other part which you think now so worthily engaged in speculation and in rhapsody, is merely the part not yet in solution—not at the point yet of true condensation. When you’re wholly crystallized, Mark, then you’ll be whole.”
“You disapprove of me, Doctor Stein?”
He laughed. “You should know better than that.”
“You have the passion for unity of your race, sir.” I laughed back. “This faith in unity which your science posits is itself the creation of a wild mystic rhapsody.”
“It is the premise of every human thought, of every human act.”
“—That has survived, since it fitted into the unitary scheme. But is there not something arbitrary about that, Professor Stein? Two intense single-minded peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews, set up a scale of consciousness based on the Unit, and narrow down the multiverse to that. Everything that men did or thought must fit that scale of One, be translated into it: everything that failed was rejected, was unrecorded, hence intellectually was nonexistent. To-day, after three thousand years of this sort of selection, we have quite an array of theory, data, thought, all in the key of One: we have a whole civilization based on One, a whole set of religions tuned in One, to which our senses as well as our minds submit and finally conform. What does that prove beyond the thoroughness of the Greeks and Hebrews? of their initial will to throw out all contrary evidence, to deny all dimensions beyond it?”
“Could this premise of the Unity have builded up so wholly the structure of science, æsthetic, logic ... the structure of human action, were it but an arbitrary premise that might be replaced by others at least as valid?”
“The strength of the limited, Doctor Stein: the protection of exclusion.”
Doctor Stein’s eyes sharpened.