human
Yes, said he,
gpt
I knocked them off the bureau and broke them one day. So I just let them go. They were rather striking-looking glasses, I always thought. I don't believe I ever saw another pair quite like them.
human
But, said Sharlee, puzzled,
gpt
Oh, yes; if anything, better. He paused, and added with entire seriousness:
human
You see those spectacles, striking-looking as they were, were only window-glass. I bought them at a ten-cent store on Sixth Avenue when I was twelve years old.
gpt
Oh! What made you do that?
human
All the regulars at the Astor Library wore them. At the time it seemed to be the thing to do, and of course they soon became second nature to me. But I daresay no one ever had a sounder pair of eyes than I.
gpt
You were in the churchyard, stated Mr. Queed.
human
I was there just ahead of you. I was struck with that motto or text on the headstone, and shall look it up when I get home. I have been making a more careful study of your Bible this autumn and have found it exceptionally interesting. You, I suppose, subscribe to all the tenets of the Christian faith?
gpt
I'm not sure that I can answer that with a direct yes, and I _will_ not answer it with any sort of no. So I'll say that I believe in them all, modified a little in places to satisfy my reason.
human
Ah, they are subject to modification, then?
gpt
Certainly. Aren't you? Am not I? Whatever is alive is subject to modification. These doctrines, said she,
human
So you are an evolutionist?
gpt
The expert in evolutionary sociology will hardly quarrel with me for that.
human
The expert in evolutionary sociology deals with social organisms, nations, the human race. Your Bible deals with Smith, Brown, and Jones.
gpt
Well, what are your organisms and nations but collections of my Smiths, Browns, and Joneses? My Bible deals with individuals because there is nothing else to deal with. The individual conscience is the beginning of everything.
human
Ah! So you would found your evolution of humanity upon the increasing operation of what you call conscience?
gpt
Probably I would not give _all_ the credit to what I call conscience. Probably I'd give some of it to what I call intellect.
human
In that case you would almost certainly fall into a fatal error.
gpt
Why, don't you consider that the higher the intellectual development the higher the type?
human
Suppose we go more slowly,
gpt
How do you go about measuring a type? When you speak of a high type, exactly what do you mean?
human
When I speak of a high type, said Sharlee, who really did not know exactly what she meant,
gpt
I will merely say that I mean a type that is high--lofty, you know--towering over other types.
human
You ought to mean, he said patiently,
gpt
Oh, Mr. Queed, I don't know about that.
human
Then I will convince you, said he.
gpt
Look at the French--the most brilliant nation intellectually among all the European peoples. Where are they in the race to-day? The evolutionist sees in them familiar symptoms of a retrogression which rarely ends but in one way. Look at the Greeks. Every schoolboy knows that the Greeks were vastly the intellectual superiors of any dominant people of to-day. An anthropologist of standing assures us that the intellectual interval separating the Greek of the Periclean age from the modern Anglo-Saxon is as great as the interval between the Anglo-Saxon and the African savage. Point to a man alive to-day who is the intellectual peer of Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates. Yet where are the Greeks? What did their exalted intellectual equipment do to save them in the desperate struggle for the survival of the fittest? The Greeks of to-day are selling fruit at corner stands; Plato's descendants shine the world's shoes. They live to warn away the most casual evolutionist from the theory that intellectual supremacy necessarily means supremacy of type. Where, then, you may ask, does lie the principle of triumphant evolution? Here we stand at the innermost heart of every social scheme. Let us glance a moment, said Mr. Queed,