Part 11

“No.”

“Then hold your tongue, you sceptic.”

“Sceptics are the most conscientious of men.”

“They have no conscience.”

“What are you saying? They have two apiece at least!”

“So you want to discount heaven, a thoroughly commercial notion. Ancient religions were but the unchecked development of physical pleasure, but we have developed a soul and expectations; some advance has been made.”

“What can you expect, my friends, of a century filled with politics to repletion?” asked Nathan. “What befell The History of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, a most entrancing conception?...”

“I say,” the would-be critic cried down the whole length of the table. “The phrases might have been drawn at hap-hazard from a hat, ‘twas a work written ‘down to Charenton.’”

“You are a fool!”

“And you are a rogue!”

“Oh! oh!”

“Ah! ah!”

“They are going to fight.”

“No, they aren’t.”

“You will find me to-morrow, sir.”

“This very moment,” Nathan answered.

“Come, come, you pair of fire-eaters!”

“You are another!” said the prime mover in the quarrel.

“Ah, I can’t stand upright, perhaps?” asked the pugnacious Nathan, straightening himself up like a stag-beetle about to fly.

He stared stupidly round the table, then, completely exhausted by the effort, sank back into his chair, and mutely hung his head.

“Would it not have been nice,” the critic said to his neighbor, “to fight about a book I have neither read nor seen?”

“Emile, look out for your coat; your neighbor is growing pale,” said Bixiou.

“Kant? Yet another ball flung out for fools to sport with, sir! Materialism and spiritualism are a fine pair of battledores with which charlatans in long gowns keep a shuttlecock a-going. Suppose that God is everywhere, as Spinoza says, or that all things proceed from God, as says St. Paul... the nincompoops, the door shuts or opens, but isn’t the movement the same? Does the fowl come from the egg, or the egg from the fowl?... Just hand me some duck... and there, you have all science.”

“Simpleton!” cried the man of science, “your problem is settled by fact!”

“What fact?”

“Professors’ chairs were not made for philosophy, but philosophy for the professors’ chairs. Put on a pair of spectacles and read the budget.”

“Thieves!”

“Nincompoops!”