Dukes refused to be drawn about Socrates.
"That's quite true, criticism and knowledge are not the same thing," said Hammond.
"They aren't, of course," chimed in Berry, a brown, shy young man, who had called to see Dukes, and was staying the night.
They all looked at him as if the ass had spoken.
"I wasn't talking about knowledge . . . I was talking about the mental life," laughed Dukes. "Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalise. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticise, and make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticising today . . . criticising to death. Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it's like this; while you live your life, you are in some way an organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You've severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you've got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple . . . you've fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it's a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad."
Clifford made big eyes: it was all stuff to him. Connie secretly laughed to herself.
"Well then, we're all plucked apples," said Hammond, rather acidly and petulantly.
"So let's make cider of ourselves," said Charlie.
"But what do you think of Bolshevism?" put in the brown Berry, as if everything had led up to it.
"Bravo!" roared Charlie. "What do you think of Bolshevism?"
"Come on! Let's make hay of Bolshevism!" said Dukes.
"I'm afraid Bolshevism is a large question," said Hammond, shaking his head seriously.
"Bolshevism, it seems to me," said Charlie, "is just a superlative hatred of the thing they call the bourgeois; and what the bourgeois is, isn't quite defined. It is Capitalism, among other things. Feelings and emotions are also so decidedly bourgeois that you have to invent a man without them.
