blow it
out.

IV

The Ignominy of Being Grown-up

[Illustration]

As I have already intimated, my greatest intellectual privilege is my
acquaintance with a philosopher. He is not one of those unsocial
philosophers who put their best thoughts into books to be kept in cold
storage for posterity. My Philosopher is eminently social, and is
conversational in his method. He belongs to the ancient school of the
Peripatetics, and the more rapidly he is moving the more satisfactory is
the flow of his ideas.

He is a great believer in the Socratic method. He feels that a question
is its own excuse for being. The proper answer to a question is not a
stupid affirmation that would close the conversation, but another
question. The questions follow one another with extreme rapidity. He
acts upon my mind like an air pump. His questions speedily exhaust my
small stock of acquired information. Into the mental vacuum thus
produced rush all sorts of irrelevant ideas, which we proceed to share.
In this way there comes a sense of intellectual comradeship which one
does not have with most philosophers.

For four years my Philosopher has been interrogating Nature, and he has
not begun to exhaust the subject. Though he has accumulated a good deal
of experience, he is still in his intellectual prime. He has not yet
reached the "school age," which in most persons marks the beginning of
the senile decay of the poetic imagination.

In my walks and talks with my Philosopher I have often been amazed at my
own limitations. Things which are so easy for him are so difficult for
me. Particularly is this the case in regard to the more fundamental
principles of philosophy. All philosophy, as we know, is the search for
the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These words represent only the
primary colors of the moral spectrum. Each one is broken up into any
number of secondary colors. Thus the Good ranges all the way from the
good to eat to the good to sacrifice one's self for; the Beautiful
ascends from the most trifling prettiness to the height of the
spiritually sublime; while the True takes in all manner of verities,
great and small. In comparing notes with my Philosopher I am chagrined
at my own color-blindness. He recognizes so many superlative excellences
to which I am stupidly oblivious.

In one of our walks we stop at the grocer's, I having been asked to fill
the office of domestic purveyor. It is a case where the office has
so