ity. Your brains are empty when you are born. Appearances, or
phenomena, are all the content your minds can receive from your five
senses. Then noumena, which are not in your minds when you are born,
have no way of getting in--"

"I deny--" Kreis started to interrupt.

"You wait till I'm done," Norton shouted. "You can know only that much
of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one way or
another on our senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of
the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is to efface
you by your own argument. I can't do it any other way, for you are both
congenitally unable to understand a philosophic abstraction."

"And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive
science? You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances. You are
aware only of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in
your consciousness. Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you
are foolish enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with noumena.
Yet, by the very definition of positive science, science is concerned
only with appearances. As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot
transcend phenomena."

"You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet,
perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science
proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence
of matter.--You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to
make myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive scientists,
if you please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it
alone. Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer--"

But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and Brissenden
and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and Kreis and
Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds as soon as he
finished.

"You have given me a glimpse of fairyland," Martin said on the
ferry-boat. "It makes life worth while to meet people like that. My
mind is all worked up. I never appreciated idealism before. Yet I can't
accept it. I know that I shall always be a realist. I am so made, I
guess. But I'd like to have made a reply to Kreis and Hamilton, and I
think I'd have had a word or two for Norton. I didn't see that Spencer
was damaged any. I'm as excited as a child on its first visit to the
circus. I see I must r