E had been talking fitfully, as the train sped on, of things suggested, perhaps, by that sense of volant instability with which a rapid journey in a third-class brake-van is wont to possess one—the mysteries of Life and Death, and the greater mystery of Life-in-Death, to wit. I had lately been reading Myers’s Human Personality, and my mind was full of Individualism, and Hypnotic Suggestion, and those fathomless strata of Subconsciousness which lie under a man as the forty mattresses lay under the True Princess, without obliterating the sensation of the single pea which, placed at the bottom, made its irritation felt through all. That was the rather frivolous vein in which I was disposed to discuss a weighty matter; but any mood that evokes antagonism, earns, if it can dissipate the monotony of a long railway journey, its own justification.
Carleon took it all much more seriously than I. He believed faithfully in the indestructibility of the Ego, and in its conscious continuance after Death. The something which ceased in one, he said, on the withdrawal of the vitalising principle, was that thing which, in life, not only directed our actions, functions and moods, but was our actions, functions and moods, so that for a body to die was merely for a body to become as meaningless as a steam-engine deprived of its steam. The essential influence had simply detached itself, like a crab from its shell, and gone elsewhere.
“When you come to work it out,” he said, “is not that steam pistons, boilers, cranks and all? The machinery is merely the inevitable expression of a force which is itself. Its parts are all made of steam, so to speak, and, when the steam goes, the parts constitute no more a steam-engine than they do a mouse-trap.”
“Rather a nullum simile, that, isn’t it?” I said. “It doesn’t seem quite to run on all fours.”
“Size is purely relative,” he answered. “Never forget that.”
“Are not you forgetting,” I said, “the fire that causes the steam?”
“Not at all,” he replied. “I don’t undertake for a moment to define the living principle. Naturally, in all mundane philosophy we have to start from a given point. Who or what arbitrarily set that point it is idle to surmise. We know only that it was set this side of Chaos, by something that inhabited the other side.”
“Well, you say that the something in us is our functions. What happens to those? Must I continue to cough, sneeze, and the rest of it, in my disembodied state?”
“I see no reason to deny it. Yet other environments might very well induce other necessities.”
“But it is an external influence affecting certain bodily tissues that makes me sneeze?”
“Of course. Only the something is your bodily tissues. A dead man can’t sneeze.”
“How about people’s hair continuing to grow after death? Deprived of its Ego, you know, it cannot grow. It even ceases, according to your theory, to be hair at all.”
“I might challenge you to produce a single authentic instance of its having so grown. But grant that, on occasion, it does; is it not possible to conceive certain cells charged, not continuously but periodically, with the vital principle, and capable of surviving for an independent period on their last-acquired store.”
“M—well—yes, I suppose,” I said.
“Why, look here,” said Carleon. “You can charge a storage battery, can’t you, and detach it and work it until the charge is exhausted? Substitute hair-cells for the battery and the vital spark for the dynamo, and there you are. I don’t pretend to speak in terms of science, but only as an inquiring layman.”
“Very well,” I said. “Let’s touch upon another point—evolution.”
“Perfectly simple,” he answered. “The changes which occur in organic structure occur in obedience to the needs of the Ego. They are just as much the Ego after as before the change. Are you other than yourself because, being short-sighted, you stick an eyeglass in your eye?”
“I may stick it,” I said; “but no amount of pertinacity on my part will endow my myopic progeny with abnormal vision.”
I thought, honestly, that he talked a good deal of nonsense; yet I could find no better nonsense with which to floor him. Carleon was an odd, mystic creature, a little exotic, but magnetic. He perpetually attracted me, and only rarely repelled. Yet, as to that last, which of us has not a negative pole to his mind best left unturned towards his friends?
“Abnormal vision!” he repeated, somewhat abstractedly. “No. That is purely an accident of subconsciousness, not by any means a question of evolution.”
“You take me seriously,” I said. “Well, seriously, how do you dispose of your disembodied Ego? What becomes of him?”