Calamy was silent for a moment. “It’s difficult,” he said pensively, “it’s horribly difficult. The fundamental question is this: Can you talk of the soul being at the mercy of the body, can you give any kind of an explanation of mind in terms of matter? When you reflect that it’s the human mind that has invented space, time and matter, picking them out of reality in a quite arbitrary fashion—can you attempt to explain a thing in terms of something it has invented itself? That’s the fundamental question.” “It’s like the question of the authorship of the _Iliad_,” said Mr. Cardan. “The author of that poem is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. Similarly, philosophically and even, according to the new physics, scientifically speaking, matter may not be matter, _really_. But the fact remains that something having all the properties we have always attributed to matter is perpetually getting in our way, and that our minds do, in point of fact, fall under the dominion of certain bits of this matter, known as our bodies, changing as they change and keeping pace with their decay.” Calamy ran his fingers perplexedly through his hair. “Yes, of course, it’s devilishly difficult,” he said. “You can’t help behaving _as if_ things really were as they seem to be. At the same time, there _is_ a reality which is totally different and which a change in our physical environment, a removal of our bodily limitations would enable us to get nearer to. Perhaps by thinking hard enough....” He paused, shaking his head. “How many days did Gotama spend under the bo-tree? Perhaps if you spend long enough and your mind is the right sort of mind, perhaps you really do get, in some queer sort of way, beyond the limitations of ordinary existence. And you see that everything that seems real is in fact entirely illusory—_maya_, in fact, the cosmic illusion. Behind it you catch a glimpse of reality.” “But what bosh your mystics talk about it,” said Mr. Cardan. “Have you ever read Boehme, for example? Lights and darknesses, wheels and compunctions, sweets and bitters, mercury, salt and sulphur—it’s a rigmarole.” “It’s only to be expected,” said Calamy. “How is a man to give an account of something entirely unlike the phenomena of known existence in a language invented to describe these phenomena? You might give a deaf man a most detailed verbal description of the Fifth Symphony; but he wouldn’t be much the wiser for it, and he’d think you were talking pure balderdash—which from his point of view you would be....” “True,” said Mr. Cardan; “but I have my doubts whether any amount of sitting under bo-trees really makes it possible for any one to wriggle out of human limitations and get behind phenomena.”