"We know--nothing, you must remember. Nothing,"
he would say with emphasis. "Nor can we know anything,
ever. We label, classify, examine certain results--that's
all. Of causes we remain completely ignorant.
Speculation is not proof. The fact that a theory fits all
the facts gets us no further."
He smiled, but with close attention, while I plunged again into a description of my beliefs. The tobacco smoke curled up about his genial face. I had no fear of him in this mood. I could say all my thoughts without shyness. I made full confession.
"Interesting, logical, possibly true," he replied, "and most certainly as good an explanation as any other, better even than most, but"--he shrugged his shoulders--"always a theory only, and nothing else. There is no proof of anything. The higher states of consciousness you mention are nebulous, probably pathogenic. Those who experience them cannot, in any case, report their content intelligibly to us who have not experienced them--because no words exist. They are of no value to the race, and that condemns them. Men of action, not dreamers, are what the world needs."
"Men of action only carry out what has first been dreamed," I ventured.
"True," replied the old man, "true very often. Men of action rarely have much vision. The poet is the highest type.... I am with you in this too--that the only real knowledge is the knowledge of man, the study of consciousness. Gnothi seauton is still the shortest, as well as the most pregnant, sermon in the world. Before we can get new knowledge, different knowledge--yes, there I am with you--consciousness itself must change and become different first ... but ... the people who get that different knowledge cannot describe it to us because there is no language." Wise, thoughtful things the old man said, while I listened eagerly. "One thing is certain," he declared with his usual emphasis: "If there is another state after the destruction of the body, it cannot be merely
an extension, an idealization, of the one we know. That
