Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/314

306 Well, maybe your mind is not in time, and so you made all the things behave the same way at all times. Mind, I don't say it is so; but it may be. Sailor: Is that all you know about it? Why not say the stones are made to move as they do by something like my mind?

When the disciple gets home, he consults Dr. Pearson. "Why," says Dr. Pearson, "you must not deny that the facts are really concatenated; only there is no rationality about that." "Dear me," says the disciple, "then there really is a concatenation that makes all the component accelerations of all the bodies scattered through space conform to the formula that Newton, or Lami, or Varignon invented?" "Well, the formula is the device of one of those men, and it conforms to the facts." "To the facts its inventor knew, and also to those he only predicted?" "As for prediction, it is unscientific business." "Still the prediction and the facts predicted agree." "Yes." "Then," says the disciple, "it appears to me that there really is in nature something extremely like action in conformity with a highly general intellectual principle." "Perhaps so," I suppose Dr. Pearson would say, "but nothing in the least like rationality." "Oh," says the disciple, "I thought rationality was conformity to a widely general principle."