David was speaking. “When I think, Tom, that there are millions, hundreds of millions of men and women: each of them has feelings deep like mine, feelings of doubt and happiness and sorrow. It seems very wonderful to me that the world should be so rich.... I used to wonder about God. It didn’t seem to me likely that there could be one Mind who knew all about the billions of people that there have ever been, be interested in them, know what was good for them, love them. But I don’t feel like that any more. This huge sea of feelings, made up of so many billion seas—well, that is true, and that is quite as wonderful as the idea of God.”
“Do you think they all feel as you do?”
“Of course they do. I know that really I am no more than the rest. I know how huge my own feelings seem to me.”
“But most of them are luckless, David, stupid victims.”
David looked wondering: “They strike me as wonderful,” he said. “Every thing! People aren’t stupid at all. Perhaps rulers and philosophers are stupid. I don’t know. I don’t know how they work. I know that no stupid man could make a chair or plow a field. And a woman, Tom, who can give birth to a child that will grow up is not a stupid woman. Think, there are billions of women who have done that! All these things seem marvelous to me. Language! Think! The little mute creature who comes into the world, and in a few years he can talk. Is that stupid, Tom?”
David was near Tom’s desk. His hand lay on a flat, blank piece of paper, and an inch rule of thin, varnished wood. He picked them up.
“Look at these, Tom. Don’t you think they’re fairy-tales?”
Tom was smiling. But he was warm. “Compared to what some men have thought and done, all men are stupid. The first man who made paper had intelligence, yes. But the dull million imitators?”
“I don’t know how to make paper. It is all a mystery to me.”
“You could buy a book for a dollar, and read a few hours and know all about it. Is that achievement, to you?”