The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied. Life holds no kindn… - Jack Williamson

Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion.

“The only real scientific support of extrasensory and psychokinetic phenomena has come from such studies as those at Duke University,” he added. “Some of the published results purporting to show the reality of ESP and the mental manipulation of probability are pretty convincing—but I’m afraid the wish to demonstrate the survival of the soul has blinded the researchers to some grave flaw in their experimental or statistical methods.”
He shook his head, with a sober emphasis.
“This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomena that takes place in it—from the birth of suns to the tendency of men to live in fear of gods and devils—was implicit in the primal superatom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The efforts that some distinguished scientists make to find room for operation of a free human will and the creative function of supernatural divinity in such apparent defects of mechanistic determination as Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty—those futile efforts are as pathetic to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All the so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking.”
His calm brown face smiled hopefully.
“Does that make you feel any better?”
“It does, doctor.”

“Sure, when something moves, somebody has pushed, but that isn’t good or bad in itself. It depends on the situation and the pusher.”
“You’re learning wisdom,” Sair said. “Only the circumstances determine good and evil. And only the future can say what the circumstances actually were.”
“Then there is no firm basis for acting at all,” Wendre objected. “What you do for the best of motives may be the worst thing to do.”
“Exactly,” Sair said dryly. “It is a commonplace that more harm is done by well-intentioned fools then by the most unscrupulous villains. A wise man learns not to judge. He may set himself certain standards, but he recognizes that they are only a personal pattern to guy his own conduct and that other standards have the same validity.”