During the busy years of my professional career, I had snatched leisure
for some professional treatises, which had made more or less sensation,
and one of them, entitled “The Vital Principle; its Waste and Supply,”
had gained a wide circulation among the general public. This last
treatise contained the results of certain experiments, then new in
chemistry, which were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to
the re-invigoration of the human system by principles similar to
those which Liebig has applied to the replenishment of an exhausted
soil,--namely, the giving back to the frame those essentials to its
nutrition, which it has lost by the action or accident of time; or
supplying that special pabulum or energy in which the individual
organism is constitutionally deficient; and neutralizing or
counterbalancing that in which it super-abounds,--a theory upon which
some eminent physicians have more recently improved with signal success.
But on these essays, slight and suggestive, rather than dogmatic, I set
no value. I had been for the last two years engaged on a work of much
wider range, endeared to me by a far bolder ambition,--a work upon which
I fondly hoped to found an enduring reputation as a severe and
original physiologist. It was an Inquiry into Organic Life, similar in
comprehensiveness of survey to that by which the illustrious Muller, of
Berlin, has enriched the science of our age; however inferior, alas! to
that august combination of thought and learning in the judgment which
checks presumption, and the genius which adorns speculation. But at that
day I was carried away by the ardour of composition, and I admired my
performance because I loved my labour. This work had been entirely laid
aside for the last agitated month; now that Lilian was gone, I resumed
it earnestly, as the sole occupation that had power and charm enough to
rouse me from the aching sense of void and loss.
The very night of the day she went, I reopened my manuscript. I had left
off at the commencement of a chapter Upon Knowledge as derived from our
Senses. As my convictions on this head were founded on the well-known
arguments of Locke and Condillac against innate ideas, and on the
reasonings by which Hume has resolved the combination of sensations
into a general idea to an impulse arising merely out of habit, so I set
myself to oppose, as a dangerous concession to the sentimentalities or
mysticism of a pseudo-philosophy, the doctrine favoured by most of our
recent physiologists, and of which some of the most eminent of German
metaphysicians have accepted the substance, though refining into a
subtlety its positive form,--I mean the doctrine which Muller himself
has expressed in these words:--
“That innate ideas may exist cannot in the slightest degree be denied:
it is, indeed, a fact. All the ideas of animals, which are induced by
instinct, are innate and immediate: something presented to the mind, a
desire to attain which is at the same time given. The new-born lamb
and foal have such innate ideas, which lead them to follow their
mother and suck the teats. Is it not in some measure the same with
the intellectual ideas of man?” (1)
To this question I answered with an indignant “No!” A “Yes” would have
shaken my creed of materialism to the dust. I wrote on rapidly, warmly.
I defined the properties and meted the limits of natural laws, which I
would not admit that a Deity himself could alter. I clamped and soldered
dogma to dogma in the links of my tinkered logic, till out from my page,
to my own complacent eye, grew Intellectual Man, as the pure formation
of his material senses; mind, or what is called soul, born from and
nurtured by them alone; through them to act, and to perish with the
machine they moved. Strange, that at the very time my love for Lilian
might have taught me that there are mysteries in the core of the
feelings which my analysis of ideas could not solve, I should so
stubbornly have opposed as unreal all that could be referred to the
spiritual! Strange, that at the very time when the thought that I might
lose from this life the being I had known scarce a month had just before
so appalled me, I should thus complacently sit down to prove that,
according to the laws of the nature which my passion obeyed, I must
lose for eternity the blessing I now hoped I had won to my life! But how
distinctly dissimilar is man in his conduct from man in his systems!
See the poet reclined under forest boughs, conning odes to his mistress;
follow him out into the world; no mistress ever lived for him there!(2)
See the hard man of science, so austere in his passionless problems;
follow him now where the brain rests from its toil, where the heart
finds its Sabbath--what child is so tender, so yielding, and soft?
But I had proved to my own satisfaction that poet and sage are dust,
and no more, when the pulse ceases to beat. And on that consolatory
conclusion my pen stopped.
Suddenly, beside me I distinctly heard a sigh,--a compassionate,
mournful sigh. The sound was unmistakable. I started from my seat,
looked round, amazed to discover no one,--no living thing! The windows
were closed, the night was still. That sigh was not the wail of the
wind. But there, in the darker angle of the room, what was that? A
silvery whiteness, vaguely shaped as a human form, receding, fading,
gone! Why, I know not--for no face was visible, no form, if form it
were, more distinct than the colourless outline,--why, I know not, but
I cried aloud, “Lilian! Lilian!” My voice came strangely back to my own
ear; I paused, then smiled and blushed at my folly. “So I, too, have
learned what is superstition,” I muttered to myself. “And here is an
anecdote at my own expense (as Muller frankly tells us anecdotes of the
illusions which would haunt his eyes, shut or open),--an anecdote I may
quote when I come to my chapter on the Cheats of the Senses and Spectral
Phantasms.” I went on with my book, and wrote till the lights waned in
the gray of the dawn. And I said then, in the triumph of my pride, as
I laid myself down to rest, “I have written that which allots with
precision man’s place in the region of nature; written that which
will found a school, form disciples; and race after race of those
who cultivate truth through pure reason shall accept my bases if they
enlarge my building.” And again I heard the sigh, but this time it
caused no surprise. “Certainly,” I murmured, “a very strange thing is
the nervous system!” So I turned on my pillow, and, wearied out, fell
asleep.
(1) Muller’s “Elements of Physiology,” vol. ii. p. 134. Translated by
Dr. Baley.
(2) Cowley, who wrote so elaborate a series of amatory poems, is said
“never to have been in love but once, and then he never had resolution
to tell his passion.”--Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets:” COWLEY.