The metaphysics of soap suds

Someone in Yahoo!Answers said recently that he/she had heard of some prominent philosopher who described human thoughts as "soap suds in the washbowl of nothingness," and asked if we could come up with a name.

I haven't found that exact quote, or anything with a distiguished pedigree, but I did find the use of the imagery, an invocation of soap bubbles in 'vain casings of nothingness,' and then the use of that image as a descriptor of intellectual constructions. I found this in a book review written for Union Seminary Magazine.

This just shows how neat a project Google Books has become. It is amazing the things you can find, including a bit of perhaps overly elaborate prose styling at the start of a review written in 1890.

The imagery appears as an expression of scepticism about theories of the "Aryan race," a subject that might have seemed harmlessly academic in 1890.

The author of the book review is R.B. Woodworth, and he begins this way: "To blow a bubble requires but a pipe, a basin of soap-suds and a blower. And it is pleasant, too, to watch these vain casings of nothingness as, reflecting in their diaphanous films the varied and beautiful colors of the rainbow, they float away beyond human ken into the azure depths of the heavens.' He goes on like that for awhile before he gets to the point. Adult intellectuals too, he says, "are bubble blowers. Castles in the air delight us children of a larger growth." And so forth.

If you want to read the whole bit, go to page 303 of the volume to which I've just linked you, and partake in Mr. Woodworth's bid for immortality.

This is probably far from what the Yahoo! questioner had in mind, but I ghad fun and, hey, isn't that the point of the existence of the cosmos?