CHAPTER XXVI
"My people had fled in terror from the scientific world, thinking it was all-powerful, and complete!" went on the witch, getting back to the main stream of her confession, satisfied that she had made me understand.
"But I held on alone, and read learned books, and I saw that the scientific pursuit of reality was leading men back to things I could understand. Philosophers based their truths upon Something-out-of-Nothing, even chemists had to make things real by wishing they were real.
"Like its predecessor, the plural world in which we witches could live, the scientific singular world was based on Fallacy. For all its accuracy and machinery, its unimaginative and feverish routine, its electric light—the scientific world had no bottom! Try to explain this world and you must begin with a lie, and no matter how carefully, how minutely you proceed, your explanation will always end by contradicting itself. Try it some day and see for yourself. You will find if this fundamental thing is true this other cannot be true, but unless both are true the world does not exist! The Contradiction, the Impossible, is the most important element in the world.
"The world rests upon magic, plain, old-fashioned, my kind of Magic—upon Just-Suppose, Error, Contradiction, on the As-If. After my long lonely time I saw that I was a Has-Been only theologically. As the doors of the church were being barred against me I walked into the laboratory of the physicist.
"I said to myself, In my magic resides the Erroneous Nothing, the Essential Fallacy! Without my unreasonable magic the reasonable world can't go on!"
Here she put down my coffee cup which she had been holding all this time and shoved it toward me. "There," she cried triumphantly, "there's your illusion—coffee cup by grace of MY intervention!—The last witch is the foremost defender of common sense! But for my reality your cup and your world would be only the apparent relation of non-existent things!"
"What foolishness!" I interrupted, for it seemed to me she was going too far. "My world is what I feel. If I am a mistake, my feeling, which is part of me, is a mistake, being part of a mistake, and how can I feel with my mistaken feeling that my feeling is a mistake? My feeling that my feeling is a mistake is itself a mistake being simply my feeling, which is mistaken in feeling that it is a feeling; or a mistake or a mistaken feeling! I have heard a lot of your kind of talk! You are just a cloud of words."
There were flames in her eyes. "True!" she cried so loudly her harsh voice cracked and she ducked her head, in embarrassment. She went on in a hissing whisper: "In the beginning there was the Word...."
"But it doesn't say, 'In the beginning, ...' now wait a minute," I told her sharply, and I didn't care if the whole café heard me—I was excited—I wasn't going to let her get away with everything!—"It doesn't say, 'In the beginning there were a lot of words....' The meaning is different."
An impudent fellow at the next table clapped his hands, applauding me, another made a low whistle.
But the witch acted as if I hadn't said a word! "Now, do you see what I mean?" she said gently.