Fixing my eyes steadily upon his left cheek, which was traversed by four parallel excoriations showing blood, I said:
'How would it do to trim its nails?'
I could have spared myself the jest; he gave it no attention, but seated himself in the chair that he had left and resumed the interrupted monologue as if nothing had occurred:
'Doubtless you do not hold with those (I need not name them to a man of your reading) who have taught that all matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being. I do. There is no such thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual and potential; all sensitive to the same forces in its environment and susceptible to the contagion of higher and subtler ones residing in such superior organisms as it may be brought into relation with, as those of man when he is fashioning it into an instrument of his will. It absorbs some-thing of his intelligence and purpose--more of them in proportion to the complexity of the resulting ma-chine and that of its work.
'Do you happen to recall Herbert Spencer's defi-nition of "Life"? I read it thirty years ago. He may have altered it afterward, for anything I know, but in all that time I have been unable to think of a single word that could profitably be changed or added or removed. It seems to me not only the best definition, but the only possible one.
'"Life," he says, "is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and suc-cessive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences."'
'That defines the phenomenon,' I said, 'but gives no hint of its cause.'
'That,' he replied, 'is all that any definition can do. As Mill points out, we know nothing of cause except as an antecedent--nothing of effect except as a consequent. Of certain phenomena, one never oc-curs without another, which is dissimilar: the first in point of time we call cause, the second, effect. One who had many times seen a rabbit pursued by a dog, and had never seen rabbits and dogs otherwise, would think the rabbit the cause of the dog.
'But I fear,' he added, laughing naturally enough, 'that my rabbit is leading me a long way from the track of my legitimate quarry: I'm indulging in the pleasure of the chase for its own sake. What I want you to observe is that in Herbert Spencer's defini-tion of "life" the activity of a machine is included --there is nothing in the definition that is not ap-plicable to it. According to this sharpest of observers and deepest of thinkers, if a man during his period of activity is alive, so is a machine when in opera-tion. As an inventor and constructor of machines Iknow that to be true.'
Moxon was silent for a long time, gazing absently into the fire. It was growing late and I thought it time to be going, but somehow I did not like the notion of leaving him in that isolated house, all alone except for the presence of some person of whose nature my conjectures could go no further than that it was unfriendly, perhaps malign. Leaning toward him and looking earnestly into his eyes while making a motion with my hand through the door of his workshop, I said:
'Moxon, whom have you in there?'
Somewhat to my surprise he laughed lightly and answered without hesitation:
'Nobody; the incident that you have in mind was caused by my folly in leaving a machine in action with nothing to act upon, while I undertook the in-terminable task of enlightening your understanding.
Do you happen to know that Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm?'
'O bother them both!' I replied, rising and laying hold of my overcoat. 'I'm going to wish you good night; and I'll add the hope that the machine which you inadvertently left in action will have her gloves on the next time you think it needful to stop her.'
Without waiting to observe the effect of my shot Ileft the house.
Rain was falling, and the darkness was intense. In the sky beyond the crest of a hill toward which Igroped my way along precarious plank sidewalks and across miry, unpaved streets I could see the faint glow of the city's lights, but behind me nothing was visible but a single window of Moxon's house.
It glowed with what seemed to me a mysterious and fateful meaning. I knew it was an uncurtained aper-ture in my friend's 'machine-shop,' and I had little doubt that he had resumed the studies interrupted by his duties as my instructor in mechanical con-sciousness and the fatherhood of Rhythm. Odd, and in some degree humorous, as his convictions seemed to me at that time, I could not wholly divest myself of the feeling that they had some tragic relation to his life and character--perhaps to his destiny--al-though I no longer entertained the notion that they were the vagaries of a disordered mind. Whatever might be thought of his views, his exposition of them was too logical for that. Over and over, his last words came back to me: 'Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm.' Bald and terse as the statement was, I now found it infinitely alluring. At each recurrence it broadened in meaning and deepened in suggestion.
Why, here (I thought) is something upon which to found a philosophy. If Consciousness is the product of Rhythm all things are conscious, for all have mo-tion, and all motion is rhythmic. I wondered if Moxon knew the significance and breadth of his thought--the scope of this momentous generaliza-tion; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by the tortuous and uncertain road of observation?
That faith was then new to me, and all Moxon's expounding had failed to make me a convert; but now it seemed as if a great light shone about me, like that which fell upon Saul of Tarsus; and out there in the storm and darkness and solitude I experienced what Lewes calls 'The endless variety and excite-ment of philosophic thought.' I exulted in a new sense of knowledge, a new pride of reason. My feet seemed hardly to touch the earth; it was as if I were uplifted and borne through the air by invisible wings.
