Page:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Huebsch 1916).djvu/226

 go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.–

—If you mean speculation, sir—said Stephen—I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws.—

—Ha!—

—For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.—

—I see. I quite see your point.—

—I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done something for myself by their light. If the lamp smokes or smells I shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it and buy another.—

— also had a lamp—said the dean—which was sold for a fancy price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical dissertations by. You know Epictetus?—

—An old gentleman—said Stephen coarsely—who said that the soul is very like a bucketful of water.—

—He tells us in his homely way—the dean went on–that he put an iron lamp before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the lamp. What did the philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the character of a thief to steal and determined to buy an earthen lamp next day instead of the iron lamp.—

A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean's candle butts and fused itself in Stephen's consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest's voice, too, had a hard jingling tone. Stephen's mind halted by instinct, checked by the strange tone and the imagery and by the priest's