Well, in this way--it has its drawbacks, of course; you remember the experiments of that Irish scientist Burke, don’t you? He generated what he called a radiobe--a single cell in a plasm culture which he had hermetically sealed and which he kept under the influence of radium. I do not recall the exact facts of the case at the moment, and I do not believe that his deductions have since been accepted, but that is neither here nor there. That idea of his illustrates mine very well. If we could prove that one cell, one radiobe, had been or could be originated or generated by an outside influence of this kind--radium, if you wish, in a plasm of that kind--we would have to admit that the whole thing might be built up in some such fashion. Why, you could base a new philosophy on that, Mitchell. One radiobe generated in a plasm culture under radium or something else, some autogenetic force manifesting itself through a thing like radium, and there you are. After that you would have to grant the possibility of millions and billions of cells coming in that fashion, whole nations constructed of cells, as they have been. MITCHELL My dear Syphers! BARRETT There was some hitch in that experiment, however. The chain wasn’t quite complete. SYPHERS I know--I know. I grant you that. All I’m insisting on is that if one cell, one radiobe, say, can be generated by a synthesis of energy, why not millions? And if millions, why not billions, the whole human family, in short, since we are a synthesis of cells--this whole visible scene in all its details? I know it sounds wild, but (_to Mitchell_) I have heard you yourself say that you thought it might be possible that we were all a part of some invisible psychic body, force body, in the mechanism of which we function in some way, just as the cells do in ours. MITCHELL (_Much flattered._) Yes, I have said as much. SYPHERS Well, then, why may not my theory be true? BARRETT May? May? Of course it may. But how are you going to prove it? I myself have suggested that Mitchell’s larger psychic body, as he calls it, may be nothing more than a fetus, a secondary creature being built in the womb of a still larger organism, but what of it? All of us, everything that we see here, may be nothing more than parts of organs that are being constructed in some huge womb. This so-called higher psychic body may not even be complete yet, not ready to be born in its realm. But how do we know? There’s nothing to prove it. SYPHERS