Unlike other materialists I had met and with whom I had something in common to start on, I had nothing in common with him.
Perhaps, also, it was the elemental simplicity of his mind that baffled me.

He drove so directly to the core of the matter, divesting a question always of all superfluous details, and with such an air of finality, that I seemed to find myself struggling in deep water, with no footing under me.

Value of life?
How could I answer the question on the spur of the moment?
The sacredness of life I had accepted as axiomatic.

That it was intrinsically valuable was a truism I had never questioned.

But when he challenged the truism I was speechless.
"We were talking about this yesterday," he said.