mutually profitable partnership with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, the plants fixing carbon and the bacteria nitrogen."

"I'm not a sophomore," Burke said a little resentfully. "You can mention symbiosis without defining it for me."

Dixon laughed.

"All right, I'm talking about symbiosis—the ability of two entirely different species of creatures to live in closest conjunction, one inside or attached to the body of the other."

He lighted a cigarette and looked at us.

"Suppose the mind and body also are two different species of living creatures, two utterly different species, living together in symbiosis?"

Of course the idea seemed a little crazy to me at first, and so it did to Burke.

"That's a wacky theory, Dixon. You can see and handle a remora, but who ever saw or handled an individual human mind?"

"Who ever saw or handled a radar beam?" retorted Dixon. "But we know it's there. Maybe your mind falls into the same class. A living, individual creature, not of ordinary matter but of non-material photons."

I became so interested I ventured a question. "If my mind and body are two different creatures, how come I don't know it?"

"Don't you know it?" he said. "You do know it, Ellis. How many times has your reasoning mind urged you to do one thing, while the instincts of your body led you to do another? Mind and body are always at strife in all of us—it's been so in all human history."

He seemed to kindle to his own idea.

"Why is it that of all animals, only homo sapiens had what we call a conscious mind? The explanations of the biologists are pretty hazy, for they don't really know the answer. Suppose the answer is that the human body is the only one in which the individual, living mind can live in symbiosis?"

Burke was still unimpressed. "That's just the old dualistic theory of Descartes, at bottom."

"The old has a habit of becoming the very new, in science," retorted Dixon. "Doctor Alexis Carrel was a pretty modern and famous scientist. And Carrel, speculating in one of his books on the riddle of mind, suggested that a mind might be an immaterial being that somehow inserts itself from outside into the human brain and dwells there."

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