Of course I never did much but listen, even when they argued this thing that I knew all about; for back in Fredonia, New York, where I went to Sunday-school, it was settled over fifty years ago.  Our dear old pastor told us the earth was exactly six thousand years old.  But I let the poor things talk on, not wanting to spoil their fun.  When one of ’em said the world was made at least fifty-seven million years ago I merely said it didn’t look anywhere near as old as that, and let it go.

We had some merry little meals for about a month.  If it wasn’t the age of God’s footstool it would be about what we are descended from, the best bet in sight being that it’s from fishes that had lungs and breathed under water as easy as anything, which at least put dimmers on that old monkey scandal in our ancestry.  Or, after we moved outside on the porch, which we had to do on account of Oswald smoking the very worst cigars he was able to find in all the world, they would get gabby about all things in the world being simply nothing, which is known to us scientists as metaphysics.

Metaphysics is silly-simple—­like one, two, three.  It consists of subject and object.  I only think I’m knitting this here sock.  There ain’t any sock here and there ain’t any me.  We’re illusions.  The sound of that Chink washing dishes out in the kitchen is a mere sensation inside my head.  So’s the check for eighty dollars I will have to hand him on the first of the month—­though the fool bank down in Red Gap will look on it with uneducated eyes and think it’s real.  Philosophers have dug into these matters and made ’em simple for us.  It took thousands of books to do it; but it’s done at last.  Everything is nothing.  Ask any scientist; he’ll make it just as clear to you as a mist in a fog.

And even nothing itself ain’t real.  They go to that extreme.  Not even empty space is real.  And the human mind can’t comprehend infinite space.  I got kind of hot when one of ’em said that.  I asked ’em right off whether the human mind could comprehend space that had an end to it.  Of course it can’t comprehend anything else but infinite space.  I had ’em, all right; they had to change the subject.  So they switched over to free will.  None of us has it.

That made me hot again.  I told ’em to try for even five minutes and see if they could act as if they didn’t have the power of choice.  Of course I had ’em again.  Mebbe there ain’t free will, but we can’t act as if there wasn’t.  Those two would certainly make the game of poker impossible if folks believed ’em.

I nearly broke up the party that night.  I said it was a shame young men was being taught such stuff when they could just as well go to some good agricultural college and learn about soils and crops and what to do in case of a sick bull.  Furthermore, I wanted to know what they would do to earn their daily bread when they’d got everything dug up and labelled.  Pretty soon they’d have every last organic remains put into a catalogue, the whole set complete and unbroken—­and then what?  They’d be out of a job.