Book Two Chapter 9 Viola's Plea for Help

Morton went to his work next morning quite unfitted for an especially delicate piece of dissection which he had in hand. He bungled it, and Weissmann transfixed him with a glare of disapproval. "My boy, these social gayeties do not consort well with science."

The young man smiled to think how wide of the mark his chief was. He held up both hands. "I swear, it shall not happen again." Then, moved by a desire to secure a comment on the curious phenomena of the séance, he related the story of his brief interview with his uncle Ben's ghost. "Now, do you suppose that Clarke, or the 'medium,' could dig around among the dusty, forgotten lumber of my mind and get hold of a queer fact like that nickname?"

"Why go so far round?" inquired Weissmann. "Why not say it was your uncle Ben who spoke?"

"You are joking."

"I am not joking. If the facts are as you say, then one explanation is as reasonable as the other."

Serviss was amazed. "You don't really mean it!"

"If you say it was an illusion of the sense of hearing, I agree; but do we not stagger among illusions? Who so well as we know the illusory nature of every fact? Nothing is stable under our hands. Of what avail to reduce the universe to one substance, as the monists do? We pry, we peer into that substance--it fades like smoke. Forty years I have probed among the cells of the body--the final mystery remains insoluble. Why? Because the atom, the thing once demonstrated 'the final division of matter,' is itself an illusion, made up of the intangible and the imponderable. This I have given my whole life to discover. Life is an illusion--why not death? Shall we dogmatize, especially on the one thing of which we know nothing? The spirit world is unthinkable, but so, at the last analysis, is the world of matter."