where there is nothing?  How can anything be something and nothing at the same time?  I leave it for the metaphysicians to ponder.  I know better.  No scholastics for me.  This is a real world, and everything in it is real.  What is not real, is not.  Therefore he is not.  Yet he tries to fool me into believing that he is ... when all the time I know he has no existence outside of my own brain cells.

* * * * *

I saw him to-day, seated at the desk, writing.  It gave me quite a shock, because I had thought he was quite dispelled.  Nevertheless, on looking steadily, I found that he was not there—­the old familiar trick of the brain.  I have dwelt too long on what has happened.  I am becoming morbid, and my old indigestion is hinting and muttering.  I shall take exercise.  Each day I shall walk for two hours.

* * * * *

It is impossible.  I cannot exercise.  Each time I return from my walk, he is sitting in my chair at the desk.  It grows more difficult to drive him away.  It is my chair.  Upon this I insist.  It was his, but he is dead and it is no longer his.  How one can be befooled by the phantoms of his own imagining!  There is nothing real in this apparition.  I know it.  I am firmly grounded with my fifty years of study.  The dead are dead.

* * * * *

And yet, explain one thing.  To-day, before going for my walk, I carefully put the fountain pen in my pocket before leaving the room.  I remember it distinctly.  I looked at the clock at the time.  It was twenty minutes past ten.  Yet on my return there was the pen lying on the desk.  Some one had been using it.  There was very little ink left.  I wish he would not write so much.  It is disconcerting.

* * * * *

There was one thing upon which Jim and I were not quite agreed.  He believed in the eternity of the forms of things.  Therefore, entered in immediately the consequent belief in immortality, and all the other notions of the metaphysical philosophers.  I had little patience with him in this.  Painstakingly I have traced to him the evolution of his belief in the eternity of forms, showing him how it has arisen out of his early infatuation with logic and mathematics.  Of course, from that warped, squinting, abstract view-point, it is very easy to believe in the eternity of forms.

I laughed at the unseen world.  Only the real was real, I contended, and what one did not perceive, was not, could not be.  I believed in a mechanical universe.  Chemistry and physics explained everything.  “Can no being be?” he demanded in reply.  I said that his question was but the major promise of a fallacious Christian Science syllogism.  Oh, believe me, I know my logic, too.  But he was very stubborn.  I never had any patience with philosophic idealists.

* * * * *