Part 2

The tutor bowed.

“And sound hasn’t? and smell hasn’t? and taste hasn’t?”

The tutor had repeated his little bow after each.

“And that’s because they depend on our senses? Very well. But he claims solidity and shape and distance do exist independently of us. If we all died, they’d he here just the same, though the others wouldn’t. A flower would go on growing, but it would stop smelling. Very well. Now you tell me how we ascertain solidity. By the touch, don’t we? Then, if there was nobody to touch an object, what then? Seems to me touch is just as much of a sense as your nose is.” (He meant no personality, but the first boy choked a giggle as the speaker hotly followed up his thought.) “Seems to me by his reasoning that in a desert island there’d be nothing it all--smells or shapes--not even an island. Seems to me that’s what you call logic.”

The tutor directed his smile at the open window. “Berkeley--” said he.

“By Jove!” said the other boy, not heeding him, “and here’s another point: if color is entirely in my brain, why don’t that ink-bottle and this shirt look alike to me? They ought to. And why don’t a Martini cocktail and a cup of coffee taste the same to my tongue?” “Berkeley,” attempted the tutor, “demonstrates--”

“Do you mean to say,” the boy rushed on, “that there is no eternal quality in all these things which when it meets my perceptions compels me to see differences?”

The tutor surveyed his notes. “I can discover no such suggestions here as you are pleased to make” said he. “But your orriginal researches,” he continued most obsequiously, “recall our next subject,--Berkeley and the Idealists.” And he smoothed out his notes.

“Let’s see,” said the second boy, pondering; “I went to two or three lectures about that time. Berkeley--Berkeley. Didn’t he--oh, yes! he did. He went the whole hog. Nothing’s anywhere except in your ideas. You think the table’s there, but it isn’t. There isn’t any table.”

The first boy slapped his leg and lighted a cigarette. “I remember,” said he. “Amounts to this: If I were to stop thinking about you, you’d evaporate.”

“Which is balls,” observed the second boy, judicially, again in the slang of his period, “and can be proved so. For you’re not always thinking about me, and I’ve never evaporated once.”

The first boy, after a slight wink at the second, addressed the tutor. “Supposing you were to happen to forget yourself,” said he to that sleek gentleman, “would you evaporate?”

The tutor turned his little eyes doubtfully upon the tennis boys, but answered, reciting the language of his notes: “The idealistic theory does not apply to the thinking ego, but to the world of external phenomena. The world exists in our conception of it.

“Then,” said the second boy, “when a thing is inconceivable?”

“It has no existence,” replied the tutor, complacently.

“But a billion dollars is inconceivable,” retorted the boy. “No mind can take in a sum of that size; but it exists.”

“Put that down! put that down!” shrieked the other boy. “You’ve struck something. If we get Berkeley on the paper, I’ll run that in.” He wrote rapidly, and then took a turn around the room, frowning as he walked. “The actuality of a thing,” said he, summing his clever thoughts up, “is not disproved by its being inconceivable. Ideas alone depend upon thought for their existence. There! Anybody can get off stuff like that by the yard.” He picked up a cork and a foot-rule, tossed the cork, and sent it flying out of the window with the foot-rule.

“Skip Berkeley,” said the other boy.

“How much more is there?”

“Necessary and accidental truths,” answered the tutor, reading the subjects from his notes. “Hume and the causal law. The duality, or multiplicity, of the ego.”

“The hard-boiled ego,” commented the boy the ruler; and he batted a swooping June-bug into space.

“Sit down, idiot,” said his sprightly mate.

Conversation ceased. Instruction went forward. Their pencils worked. The causal law, etc., went into their condensed notes like Liebig’s extract of beef, and drops of perspiration continued to trickle from their matted hair.

Bertie and Billy were sophomores. They had been alive for twenty years, and were young. Their tutor was also a sophomore. He too had been alive for twenty years, but never yet had become young. Bertie and Billy had colonial names (Rogers, I think, and Schuyler), but the tutor’s name was Oscar Maironi, and he was charging his pupils five dollars an hour each for his instruction. Do not think this excessive. Oscar could have tutored a whole class of irresponsibles, and by that arrangement have earned probably more; but Bertie and Billy had preempted him on account of his fame or high standing and accuracy, and they could well afford it. All three sophomores alike had happened to choose Philosophy 4 as one of their elective courses, and all alike were now face to face with the Day of Judgment. The final examinations had begun. Oscar could lay his hand upon his studious heart and await the Day of Judgment like--I had nearly said a Christian! His notes were full: Three hundred pages about Zeno and Parmenides and the rest, almost every word as it had come from the professor’s lips. And his memory was full, too, flowing like a player’s lines. With the right cue he could recite instantly: “An important application of this principle, with obvious reference to Heracleitos, occurs in Aristotle, who says--” He could do this with the notes anywhere. I am sure you appreciate Oscar and his great power of acquiring facts. So he was ready, like the wise virgins of parable. Bertie and Billy did not put one in mind of virgins: although they had burned considerable midnight oil, it had not been to throw light upon Philosophy 4. In them the mere word Heracleitos had raised a chill no later than yesterday,--the chill of the unknown. They had not attended the lectures on the “Greek bucks.” Indeed, profiting by their privilege of voluntary recitations, they had dropped in but seldom on Philosophy 4. These blithe grasshoppers had danced and sung away the precious storing season, and now that the bleak hour of examinations was upon them, their waked-up hearts had felt aghast at the sudden vision of their ignorance. It was on a Monday noon that this feeling came fully upon them, as they read over the names of the philosophers. Thursday was the day of the examination. “Who’s Anaxagoras?” Billy had inquired of Bertie. “I’ll tell you,” said Bertie, “if you’ll tell me who Epicharmos of Kos was.” And upon this they embraced with helpless laughter. Then they reckoned up the hours left for them to learn Epicharmos of Kos in,--between Monday noon and Thursday morning at nine,--and their quailing chill increased. A tutor must be called in at once. So the grasshoppers, having money, sought out and quickly purchased the ant.

Closeted with Oscar and his notes, they had, as Bertie put it, salted down the early Greek bucks by seven on Monday evening. By the same midnight they had, as Billy expressed it, called the turn on Plato. Tuesday was a second day of concentrated swallowing. Oscar had taken them through the thought of many centuries. There had been intermissions for lunch and dinner only; and the weather was exceedingly hot. The pale-skinned Oscar stood this strain better than the unaccustomed Bertie and Billy. Their jovial eyes had grown hollow to-night, although their minds were going gallantly, as you have probably noticed. Their criticisms, slangy and abrupt, struck the scholastic Oscar as flippancies which he must indulge, since the pay was handsome. That these idlers should jump in with doubts and questions not contained in his sacred notes raised in him feelings betrayed just once in that remark about “orriginal rresearch.”

“Nine--ten--eleven--twelve,” went the little timepiece; and Oscar rose.

“Gentlemen,” he said, closing the sacred notes, “we have finished the causal law.”

“That’s the whole business except the ego racket, isn’t it?” said Billy.