and know it is there by seeing and touching."

"But," said I, "does not that very susceptibility to bodily contact
remove the table to an indefinite distance from you? If we can see and
handle a thing, and yet not be able to hold that subtile property of
generic existence, by which, one table being made, an infinite class is
created, so real that tables may actually be modelled on it, and yet so
indefinite that you cannot set your hand on any table or collection of
tables and say, 'It is here,'--if we can be absolutely conscious that
we see the table, and yet have no idea how its image reflected on our
retina can produce that absolute consciousness, does not the table grow
dim and misty, and slip far away out of reach, of apprehension, much
more of comprehension?"

"Stuff!" cried my companion. "If your metaphysics lead to proving that
a board that I am touching with my hand is not there, I'll say, as I
have already said, 'Throw (meta)physics to the dogs! I'll none of it!'
A fine preparation for living in a material world, where we have to
live in matter, by matter, and for matter, to wind one's self up in a
snarl that puts matter out of reach, and leaves us with nothing to live
in, or by, or for! Now _you_, for instance, are not content with this
poor old Nile as it stands, but must go fussing and wondering and
mystifying about it till you have positively nothing of a river left. I
look at the water, the banks, the trees growing on them, the islands in
which we get occasionally entangled: here, at least, I have a real,
substantial river,--not equal for navigation to the Ohio or
Mississippi, but still very fair.--Confound these flies!" he added,
parenthetically, making a vigorous plunge at a dark cloud of the little
pests that were closing down upon us.