"Come on, - I'll show you the real dirt," Brissenden said to him,
one evening in January.

They had dined together in San Francisco, and were at the Ferry
Building, returning to Oakland, when the whim came to him to show
Martin the "real dirt." He turned and fled across the water-front,
a meagre shadow in a flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to
keep up with him. At a wholesale liquor store he bought two
gallon-demijohns of old port, and with one in each hand boarded a
Mission Street car, Martin at his heels burdened with several
quart-bottles of whiskey.

If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he wondered as to
what constituted the real dirt.

"Maybe nobody will be there," Brissenden said, when they dismounted
and plunged off to the right into the heart of the working-class
ghetto, south of Market Street. "In which case you'll miss what
you've been looking for so long."

"And what the deuce is that?" Martin asked.

"Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonentities I found
you consorting with in that trader's den. You read the books and
you found yourself all alone. Well, I'm going to show you to-night
some other men who've read the books, so that you won't be lonely
any more."

"Not that I bother my head about their everlasting discussions," he
said at the end of a block. "I'm not interested in book
philosophy. But you'll find these fellows intelligences and not
bourgeois swine. But watch out, they'll talk an arm off of you on
any subject under the sun."

"Hope Norton's there," he panted a little later, resisting Martin's
effort to relieve him of the two demijohns. "Norton's an idealist
- a Harvard man. Prodigious memory. Idealism led him to
philosophic anarchy, and his family threw him off. Father's a
railroad president and many times millionnaire, but the son's
starving in 'Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet for twenty-five a
month."

Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not at all south
of Market; so he had no idea of where he was being led.

"Go ahead," he said; "tell me about them beforehand. What do they
do for a living? How do they happen to be here?"

"Hope Hamilton's there." Brissenden paused and rested his hands.
"Strawn-Hamilton's his name - hyphenated, you know - comes of old
Southern stock. He's a tramp - laziest man I ever knew, though
he's clerking, or trying to, in a socialist cooperative store for
six dollars a week. But he's a confirmed hobo. Tramped into town.
I've seen him sit all day on a bench and never a bite pass his
lips, and in the evening, when I invited him to dinner - restaurant
two blocks away - have him say, 'Too much trouble, old man. Buy me
a package of cigarettes instead.' He was a Spencerian like you
till Kreis turned him to materialistic monism. I'll start him on
monism if I can. Norton's another monist - only he affirms naught
but spirit. He can give Kreis and Hamilton all they want, too."

"Who is Kreis?" Martin asked.

"His rooms we're going to. One time professor - fired from
university - usual story. A mind like a steel trap. Makes his
living any old way. I know he's been a street fakir when he was
down. Unscrupulous. Rob a corpse of a shroud - anything.
Difference between him - and the bourgeoisie is that he robs
without illusion. He'll talk Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant,
or anything, but the only thing in this world, not excepting Mary,
that he really cares for, is his monism. Haeckel is his little tin
god. The only way to insult him is to take a slap at Haeckel."

"Here's the hang-out." Brissenden rested his demijohn at the
upstairs entrance, preliminary to the climb. It was the usual two-
story corner building, with a saloon and grocery underneath. "The
gang lives here - got the whole upstairs to themselves. But Kreis
is the only one who has two rooms. Come on."

No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden threaded the
utter blackness like a familiar ghost. He stopped to speak to
Martin.

"There's one fellow - Stevens - a theosophist. Makes a pretty
tangle when he gets going. Just now he's dish-washer in a
restaurant. Likes a good cigar. I've seen him eat in a ten-cent
hash-house and pay fifty cents for the cigar he smoked afterward.
I've got a couple in my pocket for him, if he shows up."

"And there's another fellow - Parry - an Australian, a statistician
and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay
for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for
1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who
was welter-weight champion of the United States in '68, and you'll
get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-
machine. And there's Andy, a stone-mason, has ideas on everything,
a good chess-player; and another fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot
socialist and strong union man. By the way, you remember Cooks'
and Waiters' strike - Hamilton was the chap who organized that
union and precipitated the strike - planned it all out in advance,
right here in Kreis's rooms. Did it just for the fun of it, but
was too lazy to stay by the union. Yet he could have risen high if
he wanted to. There's no end to the possibilities in that man - if
he weren't so insuperably lazy."

Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread of light
marked the threshold of a door. A knock and an answer opened it,
and Martin found himself shaking hands with Kreis, a handsome
brunette man, with dazzling white teeth, a drooping black mustache,
and large, flashing black eyes. Mary, a matronly young blonde, was
washing dishes in the little back room that served for kitchen and
dining room. The front room served as bedchamber and living room.
Overhead was the week's washing, hanging in festoons so low that
Martin did not see at first the two men talking in a corner. They
hailed Brissenden and his demijohns with acclamation, and, on being
introduced, Martin learned they were Andy and Parry. He joined
them and listened attentively to the description of a prize-fight
Parry had seen the night before; while Brissenden, in his glory,
plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and the serving of wine and
whiskey-and-sodas. At his command, "Bring in the clan," Andy
departed to go the round of the rooms for the lodgers.

"We're lucky that most of them are here," Brissenden whispered to
Martin. "There's Norton and Hamilton; come on and meet them.
Stevens isn't around, I hear. I'm going to get them started on
monism if I can. Wait till they get a few jolts in them and
they'll warm up."

At first the conversation was desultory. Nevertheless Martin could
not fail to appreciate the keen play of their minds. They were men
with opinions, though the opinions often clashed, and, though they
were witty and clever, they were not superficial. He swiftly saw,
no matter upon what they talked, that each man applied the
correlation of knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified
conception of society and the Cosmos. Nobody manufactured their
opinions for them; they were all rebels of one variety or another,
and their lips were strangers to platitudes. Never had Martin, at
the Morses', heard so amazing a range of topics discussed. There
seemed no limit save time to the things they were alive to. The
talk wandered from Mrs. Humphry Ward's new book to Shaw's latest
play, through the future of the drama to reminiscences of
Mansfield. They appreciated or sneered at the morning editorials,
jumped from labor conditions in New Zealand to Henry James and
Brander Matthews, passed on to the German designs in the Far East
and the economic aspect of the Yellow Peril, wrangled over the
German elections and Bebel's last speech, and settled down to local
politics, the latest plans and scandals in the union labor party
administration, and the wires that were pulled to bring about the
Coast Seamen's strike. Martin was struck by the inside knowledge
they possessed. They knew what was never printed in the newspapers
- the wires and strings and the hidden hands that made the puppets
dance. To Martin's surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the
conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encountered
in the few women he had met. They talked together on Swinburne and
Rossetti, after which she led him beyond his depth into the by-
paths of French literature. His revenge came when she defended
Maeterlinck and he brought into action the carefully-thought-out
thesis of "The Shame of the Sun."

Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with
tobacco smoke, when Brissenden waved the red flag.

"Here's fresh meat for your axe, Kreis," he said; "a rose-white
youth with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer. Make a
Haeckelite of him - if you can."

Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic
thing, while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet,
girlish smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.

Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered,
until he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle. Martin
listened and fain would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible
that this should be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market.
The books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and
enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen
drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the
philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical
demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with
warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features
worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in, and all
followed the discussion with cigarettes going out in their hands
and with alert, intent faces.

Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now
received at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical
plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed
missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a
metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as
metaphysicians. PHENOMENON and NOUMENON were bandied back and
forth. They charged him with attempting to explain consciousness
by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery, with reasoning from
words to theory instead of from facts to theory. At this they were
aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of reasoning to
start with facts and to give names to the facts.

When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded
him that all good little German philosophies when they died went to
Oxford. A little later Norton reminded them of Hamilton's Law of
Parsimony, the application of which they immediately claimed for
every reasoning process of theirs. And Martin hugged his knees and
exulted in it all. But Norton was no Spencerian, and he, too,
strove for Martin's philosophic soul, talking as much at him as to
his two opponents.

"You know Berkeley has never been answered," he said, looking
directly at Martin. "Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was
not very near. Even the stanchest of Spencer's followers will not
go farther. I was reading an essay of Saleeby's the other day, and
the best Saleeby could say was that Herbert Spencer NEARLY
succeeded in answering Berkeley."

"You know what Hume said?" Hamilton asked. Norton nodded, but
Hamilton gave it for the benefit of the rest. "He said that
Berkeley's arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction."

"In his, Hume's, mind," was the reply. "And Hume's mind was the
same as yours, with this difference: he was wise enough to admit
there was no answering Berkeley."

Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head,
while Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages,
seeking out tender places to prod and poke. As the evening grew
late, Norton, smarting under the repeated charges of being a
metaphysician, clutching his chair to keep from jumping to his
feet, his gray eyes snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and
sure, made a grand attack upon their position.

"All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but,
pray, how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you
unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are
always lugging about into places it has no right to be. Long
before the school of materialistic monism arose, the ground was
removed so that there could be no foundation. Locke was the man,
John Locke. Two hundred years ago - more than that, even in his
'Essay concerning the Human Understanding,' he proved the non-
existence of innate ideas. The best of it is that that is
precisely what you claim. To-night, again and again, you have
asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.

"And what does that mean? It means that you can never know
ultimate reality. Your brains are empty when you are born.
Appearances, or phenomena, are all the content your minds can
receive from your five senses. Then noumena, which are not in your
minds when you are born, have no way of getting in - "

"I deny - " Kreis started to interrupt.

"You wait till I'm done," Norton shouted. "You can know only that
much of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in
one way or another on our senses. You see, I am willing to admit,
for the sake of the argument, that matter exists; and what I am
about to do is to efface you by your own argument. I can't do it
any other way, for you are both congenitally unable to understand a
philosophic abstraction."

"And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own
positive science? You know it only by its phenomena, its
appearances. You are aware only of its changes, or of such changes
in it as cause changes in your consciousness. Positive science
deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to
be ontologists and to deal with noumena. Yet, by the very
definition of positive science, science is concerned only with
appearances. As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot
transcend phenomena."

"You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and
yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm
that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the
point, the existence of matter. - You know I granted the reality of
matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your
understanding. Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology
has no place in positive science, so leave it alone. Spencer is
right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer - "

But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and
Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and
Kreis and Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds
as soon as he finished.

"You have given me a glimpse of fairyland," Martin said on the
ferry-boat. "It makes life worth while to meet people like that.
My mind is all worked up. I never appreciated idealism before.
Yet I can't accept it. I know that I shall always be a realist. I
am so made, I guess. But I'd like to have made a reply to Kreis
and Hamilton, and I think I'd have had a word or two for Norton. I
didn't see that Spencer was damaged any. I'm as excited as a child
on its first visit to the circus. I see I must read up some more.
I'm going to get hold of Saleeby. I still think Spencer is
unassailable, and next time I'm going to take a hand myself."

But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his
chin buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body
wrapped in the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the
propellers.