"Yes, I'll prove it--that's easy. But what's going to be harder is to find out why you've been an ass. You've no right to be an ass. It's unlike your record and unlike your looks and your general make-up of mind. I mostly read a strange man's brain through his eyes; and your eyes do you justice. So perhaps you'll tell me presently where you went off your rocker. Or perhaps you don't know and I shall have to tell you--when I find the nigger in the woodpile. Now take a look round, and its dollars to doughnuts you'll begin to see the light."
He paused again, applied himself to his gold box, and then proceeded.
"To put it bluntly and drop everybody else but you out of it, for the minute, you went on false assumption from the kick-off, Brendon. To start wrong was not strange. I should have done exactly the same and nobody outside a detective story would have done differently; but to go on wrong--to pile false assumption on false assumption in face of your own reasoning powers and native wits--that strikes me as a very curious catastrophe."
"Nothing easier, surely. You said good-bye to facts when you left Princetown. You don't know the facts any more than I do--or anybody but those responsible for the appearances. You have assumed that the phenomena observed by yourself and reported by other professionals and various members of the public were facts, whereas a little solid thinking must have convinced you that they couldn't be. You didn't give your reason a chance, Mark.
"Now follow me and be honest. You say certain things have happened. I say they didn't, for the very sound reason that they couldn't. I am not going to tell you the truth, because I am a long way from that myself, and I dare say you'll strike it yet before I do; but I am going to prove that a good few things you think are true can't be--that events you take for granted never happened at all. We've got but few senses and they are easily deluded. In fact a man's a darned clumsy box of tricks at his best and I wouldn't swap a hill of beans for what my senses can assure me; but, as a wise man says, 'Art is with us to save us from too much truth,' so I say 'Reason is with us to save us from too much evidence of our senses--often false.'