"Olga, what is all this rigamarole? What possible use is it for me to design a worthless gun?"

Olga smiled a long slow smile. "I would like to tell you the meaning but I can't. If you knew the meaning the rigamarole would not be necessary. But you must discover meaning for yourself. We are trying to help you discover the meaning of the words you didn't define."

"I'd like to lay hands on the guy who thought up this last little joke." She took his hand and placed it on her shoulder. "You did? Olga, I thought you were a pal of mine."

"I am, Perry, but it's part of my business to see that your treatment is approached through fields you understand and to watch its effect on you. However I think we can skip a step at this point. You obviously don't want to bother with designing this gun sight. But you could design it, could you not?"

"Certainly. Nothing to it. You see—" Perry launched into a flow of the technicalities used in ordnance and ballistics, and described with sweeps of his hands what would happen to a shell unlucky enough to be constrained by an inversed-cube type acceleration. "—and all this is in vacuo, of course. I wouldn't attempt to predict without empirical data the effect of a gaseous medium constrained by the same field."

"That's enough, Perry. I didn't understand a third of what you said, but I'm convinced that you could design the gunsight. Suppose we had such a gun and set it up here. Could you hit that sailboat over there across the lake?"

"Of course not."

"Why not?"

"Why, the mathematical formulas under which it was designed don't apply to the conditions under which the gun is fired. The more carefully you aimed the more certain you would be of missing."

"Does that suggest anything to you, Perry?"

"No, not offhand."

"You remember those words you didn't define—Weren't those words the names for things by which a man guides his life?—Honor, love, truth, justice, duty, and so forth?"

A look of dawning comprehension came into his face. "Yes, yes, I think so."

"Aren't these things just as powerful to move a man as the hunger of the belly or the stirring of the loins. "

"Yes, yes indeed. More powerful."

"Then they aren't meaningless. But like that gunsight, unless the meaning you attribute to them bears a correct relationship to the world in which you act, you cannot possibly use them as guides to go where you wish to go. Yet without these guides, a man himself is as meaningless as a gun that can't be aimed."

"You make it sound very plausible, yet a man is not a shell in a gun and truth and honor are not gunsights."

"No, they aren't. Let us drop the analogy before it leads us into absurdities. Nevertheless I think you see that what I said is true, quite independently of the analogy. Men are moved to act by very complicated motivations tagged duty, love, sin, and so forth. You yourself are moved by them and yet you are unable to define what you mean by these terms. You have accepted these concepts more or less unconsciously yet you know so little about them that you cannot possibly know whether they lead where you want to go, or to disaster. If you attempted to pilot a plane with as little knowledge of the controls, you would be sure to wreck it. You are here because you did such faulty piloting of your own life, and smashed another person in the chin in the process."

"Granting that what you say is true—and I don't concede yet that I was wrong to hit that fellow—how do you discover proper meanings for these words that will enable me to conduct myself properly by them?"

"How did you discover how to design gunsights that would enable you to hit the mark?"

"Why the theory of gravitation makes it a mathematical necessity."

"Are you sure? I seem to remember that the theory of gravitation was turned upside down and inside out in your lifetime. Did that cause all the gunsights to be junked?"

He slapped his thigh. "By God, you're right. Exterior ballistics evolved by purely empirical means, trial and error. Whenever we got enough data to analyze we invented formulas to fit. We never tried to make the practice fit the theory. When the theory didn't fit, we junked it and made up a new one. But it worked. We built machines in that way that were marvels of accurate prediction," he said and thought, then his face clouded. "But how can you apply that technique to the problems of living?"

"Well, Perry, so far as I know there are just two ways of working out a practical theory of human relations that will enable us all to live happily together. One is the hard way of trying to work out empirical principles from what we know of the real world. The other is by divine revelation. I won't say that the second way is impossible, but we moderns have grown to distrust it. Our conclusions in 2086 from the first method are embodied in the current code of customs. He who complies with that code will live with reasonably little conflict in 2086 whether he believes that the code is a list of final truths or simply rough generalizations. The code embodies our 2086 meanings for these troublesome words that you could not define. You have other meanings, unspoken, and in my opinion your meanings are both inaccurate and dangerous, for I believe that if you were able to define your code in spoken objective words you would find that your code did not correspond to the real world around you."

"But that still doesn't tell me how you arrive at these customs, or empirical formulas for conduct, or whatever you care to call them."

"Much as you perfected the art of ballistics. By a willingness to junk theories that didn't fit the facts. For example, the churches, by and large, set their faces against divorce. Divorce was a 'sin'. No attempt was made to study marriage and divorce objectively, divorce was 'sin' by divine revelation and that settled it. It is almost inconceivable the amount of harm that was done by that one false generalization alone. By rejecting the dogmatic viewpoint and examining the problem in its environment we reached quite different conclusions. In the 2086 environment divorce is not a 'sin', although it is possible to conceive different social patterns in which divorce would be 'sin'. Consider again the subject of clothing as a taboo. Again a dogmatic generalization for social conduct decreed that it was 'wrong', 'dishonorable', 'immodest' to appear unclothed. Original sin was involved, complicated aesthetic ideas were given a false objective reality, and so forth. An amazing mass of philosophical nonsense was written on this one taboo alone by people who would never think of taking off their clothes in the presence of others in order to see what it felt like. Their faces were resolutely set against such irreverent experiment, even as the scholasticists of the Middle Ages refused to watch any experiment which threw doubt on the perfection of Aristotle's Mechanics, and yet the experiment was always available and easy to perform. In 2086 from purely experimental considerations, the clothes taboo is destroyed. It does not appear in our code of customs, and one may dress or not as convenience and personal aesthetic taste indicates.

"Again, take politics. For centuries philosophers attempted to formulate the perfect state, reasoning from their own unexamined prejudices, which they usually assumed to be divine revelation. In 2086 we consider that the 'perfect state' is a meaningless sound having no objective reality. Instead we set up a political system to achieve whatever we wish to accomplish in 2086. We have no notion that it would have suited 1000 A.D. nor that it would suit contemporary Europe nor that we will leave it unchanged in the future. But we do believe that we have evolved a technique by which we can make the state serve our purposes in any age."

She glanced at the chronometer. "I have other things that I must do now, and I believe that you should think over and develop for yourself any new ideas from this talk. Bye bye!"