MR. CHAFFERY AT HOME
"That is clearly understood, my dear stepson-in-law," said Chaffery. "Our present object is discussion."
"But Ethel———"
"Ethel is yours," said Chaffery. "Ethel is yours," he repeated after an interval, and added pensively,—"to keep."
"But talking of Illusion," he resumed, dismissing the sordid with a sign of relief, "I sometimes think with Bishop Berkeley, that all experience is probably something quite different from reality. That consciousness is essentially hallucination. I here, and you, and our talk—it is all Illusion. Bring your Science to bear—what am I? A cloudy multitude of atoms, an infinite interplay of little cells. Is this hand that I hold out, me? This head? Is the surface of my skin any more than a rude average boundary? You say it is my mind that is me? But consider the war of motives. Suppose I have an impulse that I resist—it is I resist it—the impulse is outside me, eh? But suppose that impulse carries me and I do the thing—that impulse is part of me, is it not? Ah! My brain reels at these mysteries! Lord! what flimsy fluctuating things we are—first this, then that, a thought, an impulse, a deed and a forgetting, and all the time madly cock-sure we are ourselves. And as for you—you who have hardly learned to think for more than five or six short years, there you sit, assured, coherent, there you sit in all your inherited original sin,—Hallucinatory Windlestraw!—judging and condemning. You know Right from Wrong! My boy, so did Adam and Eve
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