"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.