The talks we had on his good days were an enjoyment I can hardly describe. I realized how much I depended on them, as well as on the man who made them possible. I realized also how much I depended on my other friend--on Boyde. The latter’s curious and unsatisfactory behaviour, mysterious still to my blind ignorant eyes, made no difference to my feelings for him, but, if anything, tended to strengthen the attachment. My affection deepened. There lay now a certain pity in me too, an odd feeling that he was in my charge, and that, for all his greater knowledge and experience of life, his seniority as well, I could--I must--somehow help him. Upon the German doctor and Boyde, at any rate, Kay being far away, my mind rested with security, if of different degrees. To lose either of them in my lonely situation would have been catastrophic. The old German would settle himself on the sofa, drawn up close to the bed, and talk. He was saturated in his native philosophy, but Hegel was his king.... “Sartor Resartus” enthralled him. Of De Quincey’s struggle against opium he was never tired. Of Vedantic and Hindu philosophy, too, he was understanding and tolerant, though not enamoured. Regarding me still as a “specimen” evidently, he also treated me as though I were a boy, discerning of course at once my emptiness of mind and experience. How patiently he listened to my eager exposition of life’s mysteries, my chaotic theories, my fanciful speculations.... “We _know_--nothing, you must remember. _Nothing_,” he would say with emphasis. “Nor can we know anything, _ever_. We label, classify, examine certain _results_--that’s all. Of causes we remain completely ignorant. Speculation is not proof. The fact that a theory fits all the facts gets us no further.” He smiled, but with close attention, while I plunged again into a description of my beliefs. The tobacco smoke curled up about his genial face. I had no fear of him in this mood. I could say all my thoughts without shyness. I made full confession. “Interesting, logical, possibly true,” he replied, “and most certainly as good an explanation as any other, better even than most, but”--he shrugged his shoulders--“always a theory only, and nothing else. There is no proof of anything. The higher states of consciousness you mention are nebulous, probably pathogenic. Those who experience them cannot, in any case, report their content intelligibly to us who have not experienced them--because no words exist. They are of no value to the race, and that condemns them. Men of action, not dreamers, are what the world needs.” “Men of action only carry out what has first been dreamed,” I ventured.