You have never seen the man before, you--" "Oh, the mere facts," he cried out in a kind of despair.

"The mere facts! Do you really admit--are you still so sunk in superstitions, so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts?
Do you not trust an immediate impression ?" "Well, an immediate impression may be," I said, "a little less practical than facts." "Bosh," he said.

"On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions?
What is more practical?
My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.

Why do you refuse or accept a clerk?
Do you measure his skull?
Do you read up his physiological state in a handbook?
Do you go upon facts at all?
Not a scrap.

You accept a clerk who may save your business--you refuse a clerk that may rob your till, entirely upon those immediate mystical impressions under the pressure of which I pronounce, with a perfect sense of certainty and sincerity, that that man walking in that street beside us is a humbug and a villain of some kind." "You always put things well," I said, "but, of course, such things cannot immediately be put to the test." Basil sprang up straight and swayed with the swaying car.
"Let us get off and follow him," he said.