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etext of The Philosopher's Joke
By Jerome K. Jerome Scanned and proofed by Ronald Burkey (rburkey@heads-up.com) and Amy Thomte.
Notes on the editing: Punctuation and hyphenation have been retained as in the original, except words broken across lines have been joined. Italicized text is delimited by underlines ("_"). A long break between paragraphs is represented by "***".
THE PHILOSOPHER'S JOKE By JEROME K. JEROME
Author of "Paul Kelver," "Three Men in a Boat," etc., etc.
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1909
COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY JEROME K. JEROME COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY Published, September, 1908
THE PHILOSOPHER'S JOKE
Myself, I do not believe this story. Six persons are persuaded of its truth; and the hope of these six is to convince themselves it was an hallucination. Their difficulty is there are six of them. Each one alone perceives clearly that it never could have been. Unfortunately, they are close friends, and cannot get away from one another; and when they meet and look into each other's eyes the thing takes shape again.
The one who told it to me, and who immediately wished he had not, was Armitage. He told it to me one night when he and I were the only occupants of the Club smoking-room. His telling me--as he explained afterwards--was an impulse of the moment. Sense of the thing had been pressing upon him all that day with unusual persistence; and the idea had occurred to him, on my entering the room, that the flippant scepticism with which an essentially commonplace mind like my own--he used the words in no offensive sense--would be sure to regard the affair might help to direct his own atten