“Are you satisfied about it?” The doctor laughed. “I see,” he said; “the correct rendering of ‘Ding-an-sich’ is ‘The thing as it appears to your wife.’ Oh, yes! _I’m_ satisfied!” “Then you have found the only answer that can be given to the question you booked for future discussion, What is Truth?” “Found it, eh? well, I certainly don’t recognize it,” said the doctor. “Your ideas of truth are rather limited, my friend.” “They are; limited by my human nature, and the peculiarities of my mental and moral constitution.” “Good! we agree perfectly. The most bigoted Materialist could ask no more.” “Tarry a little,” said Ernest Clare; “I have more to say. Though truth to me be relative, in Itself it is Absolute, Unconditioned”— “Unknowable,” said the doctor. “In Its entirety and for the present, yes; though, for the future, we have the promise that we shall know even as we are known.” “Known! by the Truth? Lord, deliver us! here has this man been palming off religion on us, while I thought he was talking metaphysics.” “A perfectly meaningless term, with which I decline to concern myself,” said Mr. Clare; “and you can’t escape religion, Dr. Richards, whether you talk physics or metaphysics. For my part, I don’t know what people mean by metaphysics and supernatural, when God clothes the grass of the field and notes the fall of the sparrow.” “Oh! mount the table yonder and preach,” said the doctor. “You’re bursting with it. I can see it in your eye.” “Thanks! but I can get a better grasp of the subject just here,” said Mr. Clare, taking the doctor gently but firmly by the collar. “I say, doctor, did you ever experiment upon the blind spot on the eye?” “You mean where the optic nerve enters it? well, yes, I have a little; but what has that to do with it? and what are you up to now?” “I was remembering a rather striking analogy that occurred to me the other day; whether, in the spiritual eye, there may not be the converse of that blind spot—that is, a seeing spot?” “And the rest of the spiritual eye, whatever and wherever it may be, insensible to light? Rather inconvenient, if it were not spiritual light, which is unimportant.” “But suppose this seeing spot widens with use? suppose the more light one sees the more one becomes capable of seeing, until, as St. Paul says, the whole body is full of light?” “But that is when one’s eye is single,” said Dr. Richards, “whereas you are supposing a double set of optics.” “Now you quibble,” retorted the other good-humoredly. “One might have as many eyes as a fly, yet the _vision_ would be single, as you very well know.” “I don’t know anything about it,” returned the doctor; “vision, indeed! why, people tell me I see things upside down, but I’m not conscious of it. Besides, how could one see the same things, even on your own showing, with the physical and spiritual eye? whatever you mean by that!”