"It is easier for me to believe that Mrs. Lambert did it. I am convinced that Clarke in some way played us false."
"I'm not sure of that. I am willing to grant that it is possible for the mind to alter the circulation of the blood, even to accelerate or decrease the up-building processes among the cells. If the mind can produce a pathologic process like a blister, it can also remove warts or cancer, as the hypnotists of the Charcot school claim. If the mind can move a book or a pencil without the intervention of any known form of matter, then Clarke (as well as his psychic) may be innocent, and all that happened last night be due to thought-transference and telekinesis."
The young man shrugged his shoulders. "To admit a single one of your premises would turn all our science upside down."
Weissmann smiled musingly. "So said the Ptolmaic philosophers when Copernicus came. Yet nothing was destroyed but error--they established the truth."
"I didn't mean what I said, exactly. I meant that the whole theory is opposed to every known law of physics."
"I'm not so certain of that, I can imagine a subtler form of force than magnetism. I can imagine the mind reacting upon matter, creating in its own right by the displacement and rearrangement of the molecules of a substance--say of wood. What is a wine-glass but an appearance? No, no! It will not do to be dogmatic. We must not assume too much. We must keep open minds. Are we not advancing? Is any one nearing the farther wall? No, my boy, each year should make us less arrogant. Ten thousand years from now men will still be discovering new laws of nature just as they were ten thousand years ago. It is childish to suppose that we or any other generation will know all that is to be known. Infinite research is before us just as infinite painful groping is behind us. I do not assume to say what the future will bring to mankind. Perhaps soon--very soon, science will shift its entire battle-line from matter to mind. To say the mind is conditioned in a certain way to-day does not mean that these conditions may not utterly change to-morrow. Great discoveries wait in the future."
"But you would not say that a new way of squaring the circle would appear--or that perpetual motion--"