Rhetoric of Dialogue

          When discussing his philosophical ideas, the narrator often uses basic logic to explain his complex views. At one point, as the group (the narrator, his son Chris, and their friends John and Sylvia) are sitting around a camp fire telling ghost stories. Chris asks the narrator if he believes in ghosts and he thinks about it and finally agrees that ghosts do exist. He then uses a sequence of rational thoughts to prove their existence. The conversation goes as follows:

          "It's completely natural," I say, "to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It's just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist."

          John nods affirmatively and I continue.

          "My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within the context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real at atoms, particles, photons, and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know."

          "What?"

          "Oh, the laws of physics and of logic...the number system...the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real."

          "They seem real to me," John says.

          "I don't get it," says Chris.

          So I go on. "For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity."

          "Of course."

          "So when did this law start? Has it always existed?"

          John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.

          " What I am driving at," I say, "is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and that stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed."

          "Sure."

          "Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone's mind because there wasn't anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere - this law of gravity still existed?"

          Now John seems not so sure.

          "If that law of gravity existed," I say, " I honestly don't know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me the law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannon think of a single attribute of nonexistence that the law of gravity didnt have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still 'common sense' to believe that it existed."

          John says, " I guess I'd have to think about it."

          "Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

          "And what they means," I say before he can interrupt, "and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It's a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people's ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own."

          The narrator's primary technique of persuasion is the use of logic to make a connection and prove and idea. Throughout the book so far, a reoccurring topic of emphasis for the author has been rational thought and its context in the human mind. In this passage, the narrator deliberately uses pure logic and rationality to come to an irrational conclusion. He does this to show the fault in rational human thought and how easily it can misguide an individual.