Moonchild

Chapter8 OF THE HOMUNCULUS; CONCLUSION OF THE FORMER ARGUMENT CONCERNING THE NATURE OF THE SOUL "I AM going to be perfectly horrid," said Simon Iff, leaning over to Lisa, and measuring his words with the minutest care. "I am going to do everything possible to damp your enthusiasm. I would rather have you start from cold and spark up well as you go, than have you go off with a spurt, and find yourself without petrol in the middle of the big rise. "I want you to take up this research because of your real love of knowledge, not because of your passion for Brother Cyril. And I tell you honestly that I am mortally afraid for you, because you live in extremes. It is good for a swift push to have that sudden energy of yours; but no research in science is to be taken by storm. You need infinite patience, nay, even infinite indifference to the very thing on which your heart is set: "Well, I have prated. The old man must utter his distrust of fiery youth. So we'll go on. "I'm going to talk to you about the soul again. Remember our conception of it, the idea that seemed to do away with all the difficulties at a blow. We had the idea of a soul, of a real physical substance, one of whose surfaces, or rather boundary-solids, was what we call body and mind. Body and mind are real, too, and truly belong to the soul, but are only minute aspects of it, just as any ellipse or hyperbola is an aspect of the section of a cone. [104] "We'll take just one more analogy in the lower dimensions as we pass. "How do solids know one another? Almost entirely by their surfaces! Except in chemistry, which we have reason to believe to be a fourth- dimensional science, witness the phenomena of polarization and geometrical isomerism, solids only make contact superficially. "Then, shifting the analogy as we did before, how do fourth-dimensional