PHILOSOPHY 4

A STORY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY

By Owen Wister

Contents

II

III

IV

Two frowning boys sat in their tennis flannels beneath the glare of lamp and gas. Their leather belts were loosened, their soft pink shirts unbuttoned at the collar. They were listening with gloomy voracity to the instruction of a third. They sat at a table bared of its customary sporting ornaments, and from time to time they questioned, sucked their pencils, and scrawled vigorous, laconic notes. Their necks and faces shone with the bloom of out-of-doors. Studious concentration was evidently a painful novelty to their features. Drops of perspiration came one by one from their matted hair, and their hands dampened the paper upon which they wrote. The windows stood open wide to the May darkness, but nothing came in save heat and insects; for spring, being behind time, was making up with a sultry burst at the end, as a delayed train makes the last few miles high above schedule speed. Thus it has been since eight o’clock. Eleven was daintily striking now. Its diminutive sonority might have belonged to some church-bell far distant across the Cambridge silence; but it was on a shelf in the room,—a timepiece of Gallic design, representing Mephistopheles, who caressed the world in his lap. And as the little strokes boomed, eight—nine—ten—eleven, the voice of the instructor steadily continued thus:—

“By starting from the Absolute Intelligence, the chief cravings of the reason, after unity and spirituality, receive due satisfaction. Something transcending the Objective becomes possible. In the Cogito the relation of subject and object is implied as the primary condition of all knowledge. Now, Plato never—”

“Skip Plato,” interrupted one of the boys. “You gave us his points yesterday.”

“Yep,” assented the other, rattling through the back pages of his notes. “Got Plato down cold somewhere,—oh, here. He never caught on to the subjective, any more than the other Greek bucks. Go on to the next chappie.”

“If you gentlemen have mastered the—the Grreek bucks,” observed the instructor, with sleek intonation, “we—”

“Yep,” said the second tennis boy, running a rapid judicial eye over his back notes, “you’ve put us on to their curves enough. Go on.”

The instructor turned a few pages forward in the thick book of his own neat type-written notes and then resumed,—

“The self-knowledge of matter in motion.”

“Skip it,” put in the first tennis boy.

“We went to those lectures ourselves,” explained the second, whirling through another dishevelled notebook. “Oh, yes. Hobbes and his gang. There is only one substance, matter, but it doesn’t strictly exist. Bodies exist. We’ve got Hobbes. Go on.”

The instructor went forward a few pages more in his exhaustive volume. He had attended all the lectures but three throughout the year, taking them down in short-hand. Laryngitis had kept him from those three, to which however, he had sent a stenographic friend so that the chain was unbroken. He now took up the next philosopher on the list; but his smooth discourse was, after a short while, rudely shaken. It was the second tennis boy questioning severely the doctrines imparted.

“So he says color is all your eye, and shape isn’t? and substance isn’t?”

“Do you mean he claims,” said the first boy, equally resentful, “that if we were all extinguished the world would still be here, only there’d be no difference between blue and pink, for instance?”

“The reason is clear,” responded the tutor, blandly. He adjusted his eyeglasses, placed their elastic cord behind his ear, and referred to his notes. “It is human sight that distinguishes between colors. If human sight be eliminated from the universe, nothing remains to make the distinction, and consequently there will be none. Thus also is it with sounds. If the universe contains no ear to hear the sound, the sound has no existence.”

“Why?” said both the tennis boys at once.

The tutor smiled. “Is it not clear,” said he, “that there can be no sound if it is not heard!”

“No,” they both returned, “not in the least clear.”

“It’s clear enough what he’s driving at of course,” pursued the first boy. “Until the waves of sound or light or what not hit us through our senses, our brains don’t experience the sensations of sound or light or what not, and so, of course, we can’t know about them—not until they reach us.”

“Precisely,” said the tutor. He had a suave and slightly alien accent.

“Well, just tell me how that proves a thunder-storm in a desert island makes no noise.”

“If a thing is inaudible—” began the tutor.

“That’s mere juggling!” vociferated the boy, “That’s merely the same kind of toy-shop brain-trick you gave us out of Greek philosophy yesterday. They said there was no such thing as motion because at every instant of time the moving body had to be somewhere, so how could it get anywhere else? Good Lord! I can make up foolishness like that myself. For instance: A moving body can never stop. Why? Why, because at every instant of time it must be going at a certain rate, so how can it ever get slower? Pooh!” He stopped. He had been gesticulating with one hand, which he now jammed wrathfully into his pocket.

The tutor must have derived great pleasure from his own smile, for he prolonged and deepened and variously modified it while his shiny little calculating eyes travelled from one to the other of his ruddy scholars. He coughed, consulted his notes, and went through all the paces of superiority. “I can find nothing about a body’s being unable to stop,” said he, gently. “If logic makes no appeal to you, gentlemen—”