“‘In the ascent of life, desire seems to compel its cosmic partner, as hunger its victim, suspending that operation of physical and chemical forces proper to them outside of this dominion of vitality; in its descent these forces more and more tend to resume their proper action, until finally they bring into their own domain the structure they have served; their hardening of the walls of life’s outward temple, begun for protection, has gone on to the extreme of fragility and destruction--an office as kindly as any they have performed.’ “And once more, O, my benighted friend, at page 185 he again says,-- “‘In this complex hierarchy of Nature discrete accords are sustained, so that they fall not into indifference and confusion; degrees of excellence are marked--of truth, beauty and goodness; individual sequestration and tranquillity are secured, and for each life a way--its own that no other can take, and yet open to accordant intimacies and correspondences; and in the psychical involvement life acquires a feeling of itself and a conscious control, the liberty of its dwelling.’ “And yet again at page 108,-- “’As these organic capacities are deepened inwardly, representing in their sphering and involution and convolution the synthetic action of cosmic envelopment from the beginning, the desire which has thus shaped itself by intussusception, expressing its postulation, is outwardly a flame of increase, ascending also while it is crescent until it reaches the culminant point of its physiological term, where it--’” “Hold up there. Close that valve a minute. Put on the lid,” roared Bill, “and tell me in the name of all specialized idiocy what you’re at. If you can’t untangle yourself with four thousand languages dead and alive, then you better go chase yourself into cosmic nebulosity. “If this is your Ex--pli--ca--tion--, and if this is your only excuse for involuting yourself into an introconvertible, double-back-action dictionary, then, says I, t’mud with your mysticism. And now hereafter, when you want to ‘explicate’ you go out to the harmless ward where they’ve got whole bunches of just such as your old Manhattan misfit mutt. “You go out there and talk to your own brand of mystics. Don’t you talk shop here. I’m in the drug business and I know a little bit about medicine, but I’ll be everlastingly lost in a cosmological fog if I’d know how to prescribe for symptoms like yours. The kind of microbes that manifest through the gray matter of a mystic are not identified in these mundane dispensatories. “Now, you hear me a minute, Mr. Alonzo Leffingwell--INEXPLICABLE mystic and all around D--P--of every old degree, you want to get right out of Kankakee and lose no time. The state of Illinois makes our city the center of only _ordinary_ aberrations; it does not provide wards for such illuminated inanities as you at this minute have been explicating.