of electricity. Edisons and Marconis may thrill the world with
astounding novelties; they astound me, as every one else, but straightway
I forget my astonishment, and am in every respect the man I was before.
The thing has simply no concern for me, and I care not a _volt_ if to-
morrow the proclaimed discovery be proved a journalist's mistake or
invention.

Am I, then, a hidebound materialist? If I know myself, hardly that.
Once, in conversation with G. A., I referred to his position as that of
the agnostic. He corrected me. "The agnostic grants that there _may_ be
something beyond the sphere of man's knowledge; I can make no such
admission. For me, what is called the unknowable is simply the
non-existent. We see what is, and we see all." Now this gave me a sort
of shock; it seemed incredible to me that a man of so much intelligence
could hold such a view. So far am I from feeling satisfied with any
explanation, scientific or other, of myself and of the world about me,
that not a day goes by but I fall a-marvelling before the mystery of the
universe. To trumpet the triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse
than childishness; now, as of old, we know but one thing--that we know
nothing. What! Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at
it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and
so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meanings? What is
all this but words, words, words? Interesting, yes, as observation; but,
the more interesting, so much the more provocative of wonder and of
hopeless questioning. One may gaze and think till the brain whirls--till
the little blossom in one's hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the
very sun in heaven. Nothing to be known? The flower simply a flower,
and there an end on't? The man simply a product of evolutionary law, his
senses and his intellect merely availing him to take account of the
natural mechanism of which he forms a part? I find it very hard to