into the coal cellar.  We founded our religion, our morality, our laws, our lessons, our poems, our prayers, on that simple belief.  Well, the moment men became astronomers and made telescopes, their belief perished.  When they could no longer believe in the sky, they found that they could no longer believe in their Deity, because they had always thought of him as living in the sky.  When the priests themselves ceased to believe in their Deity and began to believe in astronomy, they changed their name and their dress, and called themselves doctors and men of science.  They set up a new religion in which there was no Deity, but only wonders and miracles, with scientific instruments and apparatus as the wonder workers.  Instead of worshipping the greatness and wisdom of the Deity, men gaped foolishly at the million billion miles of space and worshipped the astronomer as infallible and omniscient.  They built temples for his telescopes.  Then they looked into their own bodies with microscopes, and found there, not the soul they had formerly believed in, but millions of micro-organisms; so they gaped at these as foolishly as at the millions of miles, and built microscope temples in which horrible sacrifices were offered.  They even gave their own bodies to be sacrificed by the microscope man, who was worshipped, like the astronomer, as infallible and omniscient.  Thus our discoveries instead of increasing our wisdom, only destroyed the little childish wisdom we had.  All I can grant you is that they increased our knowledge.

ZOO.  Nonsense!  Consciousness of a fact is not knowledge of it:  if it were, the fish would know more of the sea than the geographers and the naturalists.

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  That is an extremely acute remark, madam.  The dullest fish could not possibly know less of the majesty of the ocean than many geographers and naturalists of my acquaintance.

ZOO.  Just so.  And the greatest fool on earth, by merely looking at a mariners’ compass, may become conscious of the fact that the needle turns always to the pole.  Is he any the less a fool with that consciousness than he was without it?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  Only a more conceited one, madam, no doubt.  Still, I do not quite see how you can be aware of the existence of a thing without knowing it.

ZOO.  Well, you can see a man without knowing him, can you not?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [illuminated] Oh how true!  Of course, of course.  There is a member of the Travellers’ Club who has questioned the veracity of an experience of mine at the South Pole.  I see that man almost every day when I am at home.  But I refuse to know him.

ZOO.  If you could see him much more distinctly through a magnifying glass, or examine a drop of his blood through a microscope, or dissect out all his organs and analyze them chemically, would you know him then?

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN.  Certainly not.  Any such investigation could only increase the disgust with which he inspires me, and make me more determined than ever not to know him on any terms.