Before that. Prehistory was not just a formless timeless round of the seasons, you know. We tend to think of those people as if they resembled our own unconscious minds, but they were not like that. For a hundred thousand years at least we have been as intellectual as we are now. Probably more like half a million years. And every age has its great scientists, and they all had to work in the context of their times, like we do. For the early ones, there were hardly explanations for anything— nature was as whole and complex and mysterious as our own minds are to us now, but what could they do? They had to begin somewhere, eh? This is what you must remember. And it took thousands of years to learn the plants, the animals, the use of fire, rocks, axes, bows and arrows, shelter, clothing. Then pottery, crops, metallurgy. All so slowly, with such effort. And all passed along by word of mouth, from one scientist to the next. And all the while there were no doubt people saying, it’s too complex to be sure of anything. Why should we try at all? Galileo said, “The ancients had good reason to think the first scientists among the gods, seeing that common minds have so little curiosity. The small hints that began the great inventions were part of not a trivial but a superhuman spirit.” Superhuman! Or merely the best parts of ourselves, the bold minds of each generation. The scientists. And over the millennia we have pieced together a model of the world, a paradigm that is quite precise and powerful, yes?

But haven’t we tried just as hard all these years— with little success— to understand ourselves?

Say we have. Maybe it takes longer. But look, we have made quite a bit of progress there too. And not just recently. By observation alone the Greeks discovered the four temperaments, and only recently have we learned enough about the brain to say what the neurological basis of this phenomenon is.

You believe in the four temperaments?

Oh yes. They are confirmable by experiment, if you will. As are so many, many things about the human mind. Perhaps it is not physics, perhaps it will never be physics. It could be that we are simply more complex and unpredictable than the universe.

That hardly seems likely. We are made of atoms after all.

But animated! Driven by the green force, alive with spirit, the great unexplainable!

Chemical reactions . . .

But why life? It’s more than reactions. There is a drive toward complexification that is directly opposed to the physical law of entropy. Why should that be?

I don’t know.

Why do you dislike it so when you can’t say why?

I don’t know.