Student #1: No, sir.
Leopold: You sound it, with all your metaphysical gibberish.
Student #1: I didn't mean ghosts as spirits, Professor.
Leopold: Nothing is real but experience --that which can be touched, tasted, felt, or, in some scientific fashion, proved. We must never substitute qualitative events that are marked by similar properties and recurrences for fixed substances.
Student #2: I take it you rule out metaphysics as unworthy of serious consideration.
Leopold: As I stated quite clearly in my latest paper, metaphysical philosophers are men who are too weak to accept the world as it is. Their theories of the so-called "mysteries of life" are nothing more than projections of their own inner uneasiness. Apart from this world, there are no realities.
Student #3: But that leaves many basic human needs unanswered.
Leopold: I'm sorry. I did not create the cosmos. I merely explain it.
--from Woody Allen's "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy."
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