Appearances, or phenomena, are all the content your minds can receive from your five senses.
Then noumena, which are not in your minds when you are born, have no way of getting in-"
"I deny– " Kreis started to interrupt.
"You wait till I’m done," Norton shouted. "You can know only that much of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one way or another on our senses.
You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is to efface you by your own argument.
I can’t do it any other way, for you are both congenitally unable to understand a philosophic abstraction."
"And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive science?
You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances.
You are aware only of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in your consciousness.
Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with noumena.
Yet, by the very definition of positive science, science is concerned only with appearances.
As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot transcend phenomena."
"You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence of matter.-You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your understanding.
Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it alone.
Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer-" But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and Kreis and Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds as soon as he finished.
"You have given me a glimpse of fairyland," Martin said on the ferry-boat. "It makes life worth while to meet people like that.
My mind is all worked up.
I never appreciated idealism before.
Yet I can’t accept it.
I know that I shall always be a realist.
I am so made, I guess.
But I’d like to have made a reply to Kreis and Hamilton, and I think I’d have had a word or two for Norton.
I didn’t see that Spencer was damaged any.
I’m as excited as a child on its first visit to the circus.
I see I must read up some more.
I’m going to get hold of Saleeby.
I still think Spencer is unassailable, and next time I’m going to take a hand myself."
But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his chin buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body wrapped in the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the propellers.
CHAPTER XXXVII
The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to Brissenden’s advice and command.
"The Shame of the Sun" he wrapped and mailed to The Acropolis .
He believed he could find magazine publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would commend him to the book-publishing houses.
"Ephemera" he likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine.
Despite Brissenden’s prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print.
He did not intend, however, to publish it without the other’s permission.
His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and, thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden for consent.
Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a number of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him with its insistent clamor to be created.
Apparently it was to be a rattling sea story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and romance, handling real characters, in a real world, under real conditions.
But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be something else-something that the superficial reader would never discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way the interest and enjoyment for such a reader.
It was this, and not the mere story, that impelled Martin to write it.
For that matter, it was always the great, universal motif that suggested plots to him.
After having found such a motif, he cast about for the particular persons and particular location in time and space wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing.
"Overdue" was the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not be more than sixty thousand words-a bagatelle for him with his splendid vigor of production.
On this first day he took hold of it with conscious delight in the mastery of his tools.
He no longer worried for fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip and mar his work.
The long months of intense application and study had brought their reward.
He could now devote himself with sure hand to the larger phases of the thing he shaped; and as he worked, hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the sure and cosmic grasp with which he held life and the affairs of life.
"Overdue" would tell a story that would be true of its particular characters and its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was confident, great vital things that would be true of all time, and all sea, and all life-thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought, leaning back for a moment from the table.
Ay, thanks to Herbert Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had placed in his hands.
He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing.