head, while
Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages, seeking out tender
places to prod and poke. As the evening grew late, Norton, smarting under the
repeated charges of being a metaphysician, clutching his chair to keep from
jumping to his feet, his gray eyes snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and
sure, made a grand attack upon their position.
    »All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but, pray,
how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists
with your positive science which you are always lugging about into places it has
no right to be. Long before the school of materialistic monism arose, the ground
was removed so that there could be no foundation. Locke was the man, John Locke.
Two hundred years ago - more than that, even - in his Essay concerning the Human
Understanding, he proved the non-existence of innate ideas. The best of it is
that that is precisely what you claim. To-night, again and again, you have
asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.
    And what does that mean? It means that you can never know ultimate reality.
Your brains are empty when you are born. Appearances, or phenomena, are all the
content your minds can receive from your five senses. Then noumena, which are
not in your minds when you are born, have no way of getting in -«
    »I deny -« Kreis started to interrupt.
    »You wait till I'm done,« Norton shouted. »You can know only that much of
the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one way or another on
your senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of the argument, that
matter exists; and what I am about to do is to efface you by your own argument.
I can't do it any other way, for you are both congenitally unable to understand
a philosophic abstraction.
    And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive science?
You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances. You are aware only of its
changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in your consciousness.
Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive
to be ontologists and to deal with noumena. Yet, by the very definition of
positive science, science is concerned only with appearances. As somebody has
said, phenomenal knowledge cannot transcend phenomena.
    You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have