But I have seen too many
strange things in my life to make me accept the scientific
explanation as conclusive. I have known men and women who, after a
bereavement, have had an intense consciousness of the presence of
the beloved spirit with them and near them. I have experienced it
myself; and it seems to me as impossible to explain as a sense of
beauty. If one feels a particular thing to be beautiful, one can't
give good reasons for one's emotion to a person who does not think
the same thing beautiful; but it appears to me that the duty of
explaining it away lies on the one who does NOT feel it. One can't
say that beauty is a purely subjective thing, because when two
people think a thing beautiful, they understand each other
perfectly. Do I make myself clear at all, or is that merely a bit
of feminine logic?"
"No, indeed," said Howard slowly, "I think it is a good case. The
very last thing I would do is to claim to be fully equipped for the
understanding of all mysteries. My difficulty is that while there
are two explanations of a thing--a transcendental one and a
material one--I hanker after the material one. But it isn't because
I want to disbelieve the transcendental one. It is because I want
to believe it so much, that I feel that I must exclude all
possibility of its being anything else."
"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "and I think you are perfectly right; one
must follow one's conscience in this. I don't want you to swallow
it whole at all.
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