Predicates

He asked: "What is dreaming?"

From the loam of the den she selected a stone, fist-size and worn, and bandied it to him in a lazy arc. When he caught it in one palm, she explained:

"Dreaming is the stochastic hand that picks from the dopants of anamnesis and pitches intuition to the heuristic gaze of the nous. It is the mean of science and prescience."

He dropped the stone, so that she winced. He asked: "How do I reconcile the necessity of hope with nomological certainty?"

Eager, she counseled: "Do not strive to hope, but strive to doubt." And indicated her adventive children; a manifest contradiction. "Doubt is the great annealant. All propositions are inevitably falsifiable. Knowledge is the amalgam of credibility and belief. The division of possibility and impossibility is not an immobile line, it is a mobile field."

Still he hesitated, the diffident verificationist. But her conviction had swept him, for conviction is the magnet of the will. Become anxious, he pled: "What use to grow wings when I am chained to a millstone?"

She grinned, a rictus of knives. "I will eat your chains. And you are already alate."