"Are you sure?" she cried. "It seems to me the reverse. They are over-conscious, burdened to death with consciousness."
"Imprisoned within a limited, false set of concepts," he cried.
But she took no notice of this, only went on with her own rhapsodic interrogation.
"When we have knowledge, don't we lose everything but knowledge?" she asked pathetically. "If I know about the flower, don't I lose the flower and have only the knowledge?" Aren't we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren't we forfeiting life for this dead quantity of knowledge? And what does it mean to me, after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing."
"You are merely making words," he said. "Knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary — and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts — you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. — Only you won't be conscious of what actually is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture."
Hermione set hard and poisonous against this attack. Ursula stood covered with wonder and shame. It frightened her, to see how they hated each other.
"It's all that Lady of Shalott business," he said, in his strong, abstract voice. He seemed to be charging her before the unseeing air. "You've got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There, in the mirror, you must have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation and 'passion'."
