The Iron Heel | Page 9

Dr. Ballingford looked pained, then he brightened up and said:
"Granted this horrible picture you have drawn, yet you must confess that metaphysics
was inherently potent in so far as it drew humanity out of this dark period and on into the
illumination of the succeeding centuries."
"Metaphysics had nothing to do with it," Ernest retorted.
"What?" Dr. Hammerfield cried. "It was not the thinking and the speculation that led to

the voyages of discovery?"
"Ah, my dear sir," Ernest smiled, "I thought you were disqualified. You have not yet
picked out the flaw in my definition of philosophy. You are now on an unsubstantial
basis. But it is the way of the metaphysicians, and I forgive you. No, I repeat,
metaphysics had nothing to do with it. Bread and butter, silks and jewels, dollars and
cents, and, incidentally, the closing up of the overland trade-routes to India, were the
things that caused the voyages of discovery. With the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, the
Turks blocked the way of the caravans to India. The traders of Europe had to find another
route. Here was the original cause for the voyages of discovery. Columbus sailed to find
a new route to the Indies. It is so stated in all the history books. Incidentally, new facts
were learned about the nature, size, and form of the earth, and the Ptolemaic system went
glimmering."
Dr. Hammerfield snorted.
"You do not agree with me?" Ernest queried. "Then wherein am I wrong?"
"I can only reaffirm my position," Dr. Hammerfield retorted tartly. "It is too long a story
to enter into now."
"No story is too long for the scientist," Ernest said sweetly. "That is why the scientist gets
to places. That is why he got to America."
I shall not describe the whole evening, though it is a joy to me to recall every moment,
every detail, of those first hours of my coming to know Ernest Everhard.
Battle royal raged, and the ministers grew red-faced and excited, especially at the
moments when Ernest called them romantic philosophers, shadow-projectors, and similar
things. And always he checked them back to facts. "The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!"
he would proclaim triumphantly, when he had brought one of them a cropper. He bristled
with facts. He tripped them up with facts, ambuscaded them with facts, bombarded them
with broadsides of facts.
"You seem to worship at the shrine of fact," Dr. Hammerfield taunted him.
"There is no God but Fact, and Mr. Everhard is its prophet," Dr. Ballingford paraphrased.
Ernest smilingly acquiesced.
"I'm like the man from Texas," he said. And, on being solicited, he explained. "You see,
the man from Missouri always says, "You've got to show me." But the man from Texas
says, "You've got to put it in my hand." From which it is apparent that he is no
metaphysician."
Another time, when Ernest had just said that the metaphysical philosophers could never
stand the test of truth, Dr. Hammerfield suddenly demanded:

"What is the test of truth, young man? Will you kindly explain what has so long puzzled
wiser heads than yours?"
"Certainly," Ernest answered. His cocksureness irritated them. "The wise heads have
puzzled so sorely over truth because they went up into the air after it. Had they remained
on the solid earth, they would have found it easily enough--ay, they would have found
that they themselves were precisely testing truth with every practical act and thought of
their lives."
"The test, the test," Dr. Hammerfield repeated impatiently. "Never mind the preamble.
Give us that which we have sought so long--the test of truth. Give it us, and we will be as
gods."
There was an impolite and sneering scepticism in his words and manner that secretly
pleased most of them at the table, though it seemed to bother Bishop Morehouse.
"Dr. Jordan* has stated it very clearly," Ernest said. "His test of truth is: 'Will it work?
Will you trust your life to it?'"
* A noted educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the Christian
Era. He was president of the Stanford University, a private benefaction of the times.
"Pish!" Dr. Hammerfield sneered. "You have not taken Bishop Berkeley* into account.
He has never been answered."
* An idealistic monist who long puzzled the philosophers of that time with his denial of
the existence of matter, but whose clever argument was finally demolished when the new
empiric facts of science were philosophically generalized.
"The noblest metaphysician of them all," Ernest laughed. "But your example is
unfortunate. As Berkeley himself attested, his metaphysics didn't work."
Dr. Hammerfield was angry, righteously angry. It was as though he had caught Ernest in
a theft or a lie.
"Young man," he trumpeted, "that statement is on a par with all you