Four or five, I say, and yet, strictly speaking, only four of them spoke, but there was a fifth person in the room who sat in silence, thinking or dozing, and whose only contribution to the debate was an occasional grunt of approval. The man was the same age as his companions, i.e., between forty and fifty years old; he was from the provinces, wealthy, intelligent, not uneducated, and, it would seem, shrewd and somewhat caustic. He never participated in their discussions or arguments, and always justified his silence with a paradox, saying that discussion was simply the polite form of the latent warrior instinct man had inherited from beasts. He would add that the seraphim and cherubim never disagreed, and they were eternal, spiritual perfection. When he gave this same answer that night, one of the others took him up on it and challenged him to prove his assertion, if he could. Jacobina (for that was his name) thought for a moment, then replied:

“All things considered, perhaps you’re right.”

And suddenly, in the middle of the night, this taciturn fellow began to hold forth, not for two or three minutes, but for thirty or forty. The meandering conversation had come to rest upon the nature of the soul, a point that radically divided the four friends. No two minds thought alike; not only was there no agreement, discussion became difficult, not to say impossible, on account of the multiplicity of issues branching out from the main trunk of the debate, and perhaps also on account of the inconsistency of the various positions adopted. One of the participants asked Jacobina to offer an opinion, or, at the very least, a conjecture.

“No conjecture and no opinion,” he replied. “Either one can lead to disagreement and, as you all know, I never engage in arguments. But if you will listen in silence, I can tell you about an episode in my life that demonstrates the issue in question in the clearest possible terms. To begin with, there is not one soul, but two—”

“Two?”