"By all that," she said, "you imply that philosophizing doesn't get one anywhere. Yet you philosophize as never was, and you seem to be getting ahead like a comet."
"Philosophy isn't the propeller, it's the log that records the progress and adventures of the mind at sea. If by philosophizing you mean the mental gymnastics which toughen thought for subsequent applied mentality, I dare say philosophy can be said to get one ahead; but it doesn't make one wiser in any real sense. The savant knows more than Katie Salter about the nature of the ingredients of life, but that doesn't make him a better liver than Katie. No doubt the man who can enunciate a theory of relativity is more commendable to God than the woman who can only prevent your son from eating angle-worms, for God's evolution depends on intelligence, and Herr Doktor Einstein is more intelligent than Katie Salter, unbedingt. But God is strangely ungrateful; he treats them both alike, giving us all impartially the status of drops in the salty ocean of eternity. What we call our life is merely the instant when we are phosphorescent; the savant may be more luminously phosphorescent than you and me, but before he can say Jack Robinson he has relapsed into the ocean and new drops of salty water have formed, comprising left-over particles of dead hims and yous and mes, forming a new identity which is tossed up into birth to be luminous for a moment and say Jack Robinson and then disintegrate in favor of still further
