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The girl, a complete, hysterical, broken wreck by this time, with a moan broke from him, tottered across the room and flung herself at Naomi's feet, reaching for her hand.

"Don't let him do it!" she sobbed. "It is the way he says. He's telling the truth. I tried to flirt with him at the dance last night and he scolded me. I came here because he had hurt my pride. I was going to make him-like me."

"Well, I'm going to cure you for all time." Hamar poised the whip to bring it down across her shoulders. On the instant his eyes met Naomi's and he checked himself, freezing on the top of the stroke, a wild, distraught figure of anger. "Stop, Hamar," Naomi choked. "I believe you. It's enough. Let her go." You really believe?" "I believe."

Hamar flung the whip across the room. "Get out of here as quick as you can," he muttered hoarsely, throwing open the door and pointing toward the corridor.

The dazed, weeping girl disappeared. When she was gone the man sank into his desk chair, weak and white. He did not look at his wife; but in a moment she was standing beside him, her arm around his bowed shoulders. Then she sank to the rug and laid her cheek against his knee. Thus she sat a long while without speaking.

"You did right," she said presently. "You did right not to let me go away thinking what I was thinking. If you had let me go you never could have made me believe what I believe now."

"I knew that," said Hamar. "I couldn't take that chance. I had to settle it here. I had to win. I didn't dare to see this thing we have built together wrecked."

"There is only one cloud now," she said. "In my effort to get back to youfor you know now I saw you and Georgia at the club last night-I went out to the orphans' home to get Michael to-day so we could keep him, you and I, always. And I found him gone."

She waited in silence. Then she went on again, slowly and painfully.

"Somebody took him. The nurse in charge wouldn't say who. I was sick, dazed. So I came here, intending to drive you home and try to tell you that I wanted to take another boy, somebody, if we can't have Michael."

Still Hamar Widdowson did not stir. His wife went on:

"One thing that made me believe what you said about the Terriss girl was—this whip." She held it up. "It is Michael's little circus whip. To see that you had it here! You wanted Michael so much but you wouldn't say so, because you didn't want to force me to take him. We've been fooling ourselves. You had his little whip!"

Under his brown hand her shoulders told of the depth of her grief.

The man laughed softly, stroking her hair. Then he drew her up and confronted her, with his hands gently supporting her.

"Just come with me a moment, Naomi," he said, after looking at her thoughtfully for a long moment.

Hamar crossed the room and threw open the door that led to the draftingtables. And through that door Naomi saw Michael, seated happily on the floor, drawing with enormous pencils on bristol board. Hamar followed his wife as she passed swiftly through the doorway.

"I was playing with him when Georgia Terriss came in," he remarked. "I was going to bring him out to the house tonight and smuggle him up to his little room, the one he used before. He had his little whip with him. The nurse told me he had been taking it to bed with him."

Looking up at Hamar from the floor where she held the child in her arms, Naomi said:

"I was going to drive you to Big Savage for dinner to-night, but, instead, I think we'll go home. And we'll call it supper."

BY EDWARD G. SPAULDING

Author of "What Shall I Believe?" "The Walls of the Past," etc.

HY do men disagree? Why is there not at the present time and why has there not been in the past more agreement among men regarding matters of common sense and every-day life, law and politics, art and literature, religion and theology, war and peace, science and philosophy? What strikes one is the fact, not of accord, but of discord in almost infinite variety in regard to nearly every question and problem in each of these aspects of civilization. But why is this so? Why should men not agree rather than disagree, especially when, after several thousand years of civilization, they have had, seemingly, every chance to reach a common understanding on at least many questions. Is it because disagreement is writ deep in the very nature of things? Are there in human nature ineradicable factors that produce disagreement, or, in the world outside of man, factors that make any supposedly possible basis of agreement, such as truth and fact, really but superstition and delusion? Certainly that one or the other of these causes, or both, is operative would seem to be the conclusion to which one is forced by the predominance of disagreement over agreement. Accordingly, one may ask if it would not, seemingly, be the course of wisdom to conclude not only that it is hopeless for men ever to seek to agree, but that it will forever remain hopeless, and to accommodate oneself to this conclusion. Indeed, one should perhaps go further and ask whether it would be fortunate if men did agree more than they do. Would this be conducive to human welfare? Would things move, evolve, or progress if the disagreement that is now rampant were displaced by agreement? Is not intellectual discord, after all, a motive force for change, although it remains

undiscoverable whither that change is taking us?

These and other allied questions I have been recently pondering. Why the question should come to me I hardly know. Perhaps if a psychoanalyst were to get at my subconsciousness he could find out. I surmise, however, that it is because I have a "questioning complex," and because I have been impressed, consciously and subconsciously, by the welter of disagreement that is at large in the world at the present time, and by certain modern or recent developments in physics, biology, psychology, and philosophy. As a result I confess that I begin to be sceptical of the tradition in which I have been brought up. According to that tradition there were facts which two or more persons could perceive; there was also truth, consisting of a system of many truths, that was one and the same for all, could it only be found. And there were ways of getting at such common facts and truths, both by sensation and by reason. Two men could see, and agree that they saw, for example, the same color or length. Two men could grant, on the basis of reason, that, for example, the sum of the angles of a plane triangle is equal to two right angles, and that the sun attracts the earth and the earth the sun according to the law of gravitation as it was formulated by Newton. These were absolute truths. According to that tradition, further, there was, as it were, such co-operation possible between fact and sensation, truth and reason, that agreement was possible at least in science, if not in philosophy, theology, art, and politics, and accordingly science began to be held up as the model for the others.

Now all is different. There is more disagreement than ever in religion and theology. There is, of course, lack of agreement in all the arts, and it is well known that no two philosophers ever concur in

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their views. It is certainly impossible, also, to find any two men who are of the same opinion on such historical or political questions as who caused the war and how to settle the payment of reparations. But finally, in science itself to-day, not only is there the disagreement that has been long recognized as present in the making of observations, the forming of hypotheses, and the taking of measurements, but disagreement is now shown by science itself to be necessary and unavoidable. Thus, on the one hand, we have the biological sciences maintaining that no two individuals are ever quite alike, that all is change and evolution, and that reason is controlled by emotion and by various subconscious desires and wishes; and, on the other hand, we have physics, in the case of the Einstein theory, advancing the view, for example, that all measurement, upon which all exact science depends, is wholly relative to the observer, so that there is no such thing as the same size, the same weight, and the same time to any two observers. In the one case the view seems to be justified that no two individuals can agree in respect to their sensations, emotions, and reasoning operations; that a thing no sooner is than it is not; that there is no such thing as a fact unless it be the fact of change and the uniqueness of the individual; and that cold, emotionless, impersonal, objective reasoning does not exist. In the other case the conclusion is reached that there are no such realities as one space, one distance, and one time, as men have assumed there was ever since the Greeks. Thus it would seem that one must say that the tables have been turned, and that the fields in which disagreement has been and still is rampant are now the model for science rather than conversely. Indeed, fuel is added to the flame from philosophy itself. For out of the general theory of evolution there has developed that philosophy, calling itself pragmatism, which maintains that there is no such thing as truth in the old sense of there being just one truth to which men may approach nearer and nearer, but only in the sense of that which is useful in some way or other. But what once was useful may now no longer be so; what to-day is useful may not be useful to-morrow.

It would almost seem then that, in addition to the disagreement which comes with no effort, men were now not only striving to disagree, but also endeavoring both to justify and to show the inevitableness of disagreement. Why should men disagree? Well, why should they not? Modern science discovers every reason for discord, none for accord. And yet there seems to be in this discovery a snake in the grass somewhere. For if it can be demonstrated that there are causes that make disagreement inevitable, then there is agreement between two or more individuals, at least within the limits of the beginning and the end of that demonstration. For example, if evolution and the biological sciences lead to or imply complete individualism, then there is something not individualistic in the acceptance of evolution as a premise, of individualism as a result, and of the several steps whereby the one follows logically from the other. In order to demonstrate to another person the necessity of disagreement, there must first be agreement. All individualism thus limits itself. And again, for example, when Professor Einstein and his disciples demonstrate their theory that length and time are relative and peculiar to each and every observer, so that others accept this conclusion, then there is presupposed agreement in regard to the premises on which the demonstration rests as well as to the conclusions to which these premises lead. And among these conclusions there is to be found the interesting one that, after all, not everything is relative, but that there are non-relative or invariant relations between or among things that vary-"natural laws," we would call them. And there stands out, also, the fact that it is by reason, in different individuals, that such invariant relations are discovered.

Men, then, disagree. Of that, there is no doubt. But if they raise the question as to why this is the fact, then find an answer to this question, and, finally, give reasons for their answer, two things become evident. One is that agreement is possible where there is reason and demonstration, and the other is that there are at least some facts which are the same for all men. Such facts are those which render demonstration possible, and which are,

therefore, facts that are disclosed to reason. Thus the view that it is sensation alone that gives an acquaintance with facts, or that the only facts which are disclosed to our consciousness are the facts of sensation, is shown to be the unjustifiable assumption and prejudice of a naturalistic age. The very endeavor to demonstrate that this is the case but presupposes that it is not.

There is, then, in the affairs of men and in the make-up of men a basis for agreement and accord, and that basis is, first, reason, and, secondly, the facts that are accessible to reason. Indeed that this is the case has been, with few exceptions, the traditional and orthodox position in our Western way of looking at things, from the earliest Greek thinkers to relatively recent times. Euclid's geometry is the best and clearest example of a body of facts, disclosed to reason, and to reason alone, on which all men can agree. And men still do agree on the correctness of that geometry as a series of deductions from Euclid's original postulates, although other geometries are known to-day. But before Euclid there were others who maintained that it was upon the basis of reason that men could agree, and that reason could discover facts which were facts for all. Parmenides, Xenophanes, Zeno, Anaxagoras, and later, as a contemporary of Euclid, Plato, all took this position. These men are our intellectual forebears, the makers of that traditional point of view of the Middle Ages, the effects of which we all still inherit, that the things of the material world, the things of the body, are not so real as the things of the reason, the soul, or the spirit; indeed, that they are not only not so real, but are illusory, merely apparent, and, in fact, evil. Those early pioneers in the discovery of the means and methods by which men in our Western civilization still conduct their thinking were the first in the history of the race really to think, even as the Egyptians were the first to build pyramids, and the Phoenicians to sail the seas. Motivated by curiosity, impressed by the diversity of the facts of sense, and actuated unconsciously by the desire for a social standard, these first thinkers regarded and used reason as the only revealer of fact and truth, as the only

source of that which was eternal and unchangeable. For them, only that which would stand the test of reason by showing itself to be consistent and free from contradiction was to be accepted as real. Diversity and change, since they did not stand this test, were accordingly put into the limbo of the unreal and the false. Thus it was that there was introduced into our Western mode of thought, to have the profoundest effect on our science, our theology, our philosophy, and even our art, the idea of the superiority of unity over diversity and difference, of the absolute over the relative, of the unchanging and the permanent over the changing, and of the rational and the spiritual over the sensational and the material.

But to-day a different philosophy prevails. If the Greek stood for the appeal to reason as the revealer of fact and truth that were common to all, and if the Middle Ages and scholasticism stood for the appeal to spiritual and absolute authority as claimed by the Church, then the last three hundred years, as marked by the coming of natural science, have not only tended more and more to accept sensation as the only source of facts, but also to look more and more critically on reason. Thus the tables have been reversed. For whereas the Greek and the scholastic subordinated sense to reason and to revelation, natural science and that philosophy which has grown out of it make reason bow to sense, to experiment, and to observation. The result has been not only that men have disagreed more and more, but that disagreement is now found to be both necessary in fact and justifiable in philosophy.

This conclusion is the result of the development of two branches of modern science, biology and psychology, following the earlier development of astronomy, physics, mechanics, and chemistry. It is the outcome of the study, by psychology and biology, of what is present and presupposed in every endeavor to think, to know, to have sensations of objects, and that is the man who thinks, who knows, who is conscious in some way. The Greeks in the early period of the development of their thought hardly seemed to realize that if there is knowledge there must be a knower, if thinking, a thinker, if reasoning,

a reasoner. Actuated by intellectual curiosity they discovered problems concerning the natural objects that surrounded them, and they endeavored to solve these problems. They never doubted that it was possible to know or that there was truth, or that men could reach a common understanding. But they forgot the part that was played by themselves in this process, and never realized that the very fact that there was such a part itself presented a problem. Only when various attempts to solve some of the more general problems presented by nature had led to diverse solutions, and when social, religious, and political life in Greece were in anarchy, did it dawn upon the Greek mind that the human factor was present in all attempts to get knowledge, and that perhaps for this very reason knowledge was impossible and disagreement inherent in all endeavors to arrive at the truth. The recognition, or at least the claim, that this was the fact was due to Protagoras and his band of Sophists. Yet their claim was not unargued nor without a foundation. For out of the disagreement of the fifth and sixth centuries as to whether everything was not a mere flux with nothing permanent, or whether the flux and flow were a mere illusion, and the permanent alone real, there had come the naturalistic and materialistic philosophy of Democritus as a compromise between these two extremes. Could not material objects and there were none other for Democritus-consist of minute parts called atoms which were all alike in their qualities, differing only in shape and size? And, especially if space were identical with emptiness, could not these minute particles move without endangering or changing their identity, thus themselves remaining unchanged and permanent, while yet forming all sorts of combinations? And could not human beings, soul and all, be merely such chance combinations, with it most improbable that any two individuals would ever be just alike in either body or spirit, senses or reason? The answer of Democritus to these questions was "yes," and therewith the Sophistic philosophy of disagreement seemed to receive final justification. Men disagreed, but what else could be expected since all men were different in body and

sense, and all reason was derived from sense? Could aught else be expected then than that all men should also reason differently, and that there should be no such thing as common understanding and assent?

Thus it was that in ancient times the fact that men disagreed was explained by a theory concerning nature a theory which, although lost sight of for many centuries, was revived in the seventeenth century and incorporated in our modern physics and chemistry. It was a theory also in accordance with which, even as with our modern naturalistic philosophy, there was no difference of kind between man and nature. Nature was in part human nature, and human nature was but part of that nature which was only the restless, ceaseless, haphazard motion of minute particles.

The Sophists, however, made a fatal slip when they endeavored to convince others of the correctness of their conclusion that there was no use in men even trying to agree. For they were therewith asking men to agree to this conclusion as well as, implicitly, to the grounds upon which it was based. They were presupposing not only that men could agree, at least in regard to some things, but also that there was some principle in human beings, some kind of a reality, that made such agreement possible, and that guaranteed its reality. This principle, this reality, could not therefore be of the same kind with the human body, the human senses, but must be a thing apart.

Socrates was the first to see and to make use of this inconsistency in the Sophists' position-which is also the inconsistency that is present in all that modern materialism and naturalism which are but a variant of the ancient philosophy of the Sophists-and Socrates was therewith the founder of a tradition that has been the orthodox view of our Western civilization. For from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine, from Augustine to Anselm, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas, and from these men to Descartes, Kant, and Hegel the great traditional view has been that in man at least there is a principle that is different in kind from body and sense-organ, muscle and nerve, and from those elements, whether they be regarded as the fire,

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