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self because it has been explained by competent men as the
convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never
have such inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?
Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman ef-
fort of memory to try and concentrate and remember before
he could say:
—They tell me on the best authority it is a simple sub-
stance and therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal,
I understand, but for the possibility of its annihilation by
its First Cause Who, from all I can hear, is quite capable of
adding that to the number of His other practical jokes, cor-
ruptio per se and corruptio per accidens both being excluded
by court etiquette.
Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of
this though the mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his
sublunary depth still he felt bound to enter a demurrer on
the head of simple, promptly rejoining:
—Simple? I shouldn’t think that is the proper word. Of
course, I grant you, to concede a point, you do knock across
a simple soul once in a blue moon. But what I am anxious
to arrive at is it is one thing for instance to invent those rays
Rontgen did or the telescope like Edison, though I believe
it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean, and the
same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natu-
ral phenomenon such as electricity but it’s a horse of quite
another colour to say you believe in the existence of a su-
pernatural God.
—O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclu-
sively by several of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ,