eld where you are clearly not
so."

Someone in the back of the room applauded the senator's eloquence.

"Senator Jones," said Miss Francis, turning her eyes on him with the
attention I knew so well, the look which meant she had found an interest
for the moment excluding all others, "you accuse me of what amounts to
crime or at least criminal folly and I must answer that your accusations
are at once both true and false. I have been foolish, but it was not in
despising the constrictions and falsity of the academic world. I _have_
flouted authority, but it was not the authority of the movingpicture
heroes, whose comic errors are perpetuated for generations, like those
of Pasteur, or so quietly repudiated their repudiation passes unnoticed,
like those of Lister, in order to protect a vested interest. The
authority I have flouted, in my arrogance as you call it, is that
authority all scientists recognized in the days when science was
scientific and called itself, not boastfully by the name of all
knowledge, but more humbly and decently, natural philosophy. That
authority is what theologians term the Will of God; others, the life
force, the immaterial principle, the common unconscious, or whatever you
will. When I, along with all the academic robots whom you admire, denied
that authority, we did not make ourselves, as we thought, men of pure
science, but, on the contrary, by deposing one master we invited in a
horde of others. Since we could not submit to moral force we submitted
in our blind stupidity--we called it the rejection of metaphysical
concepts--to financial force, to political force, to social force; and
finally, since there was no longer any reward in itself for our
speculations, we submitted to the lust for personal aggrandizement in
fortune, in notoriety, in castebound irresponsibility, and even for the
hypocritical backslapping of our fellows.

"In the counterrevolution known as the nineteenth century we even
repudiated the name of speculation and it became a term of disrepute,
like metaphysical. We went further than a mere disavowal of the name; we
disavowed the whole process and turned with disgust from the using of
our minds to the use of our hands in a manner which would have revolted
the most illiterate of Carpathian peasants. We extirpated the salivary
glands of dogs in order to find out if they would slobber without them.
We cut off the tails of mice to discover if the operation affected their
greatgr