against, and cruel indeed to ridicule. I was
convinced that of themselves these mists round her
native intelligence, engendered by a solitary and
musing childhood, would subside in the fuller
daylight of wedded life. She seemed pained
when she saw how resolutely I shunned a subject
dear to her thoughts. She made one or two
timid attempts to renew it, but my grave looks
sufficed to check her. Once or twice, indeed, on
such occasions, she would turn away and leave
me, but she soon came back; that gentle heart
could not bear one unkindlier shade between
itself and what it loved. It was agreed that
our engagement should be, for the present,
confided only to Mrs. Poyntz. When Mrs.
Ashleigh and Lilian returned, which would be in a
few weeks at furthest, it should be proclaimed;
and our marriage could take place in the autumn,
when I should be most free for a brief holiday
from professional toils.

So we parted—as lovers part. I felt none of
those jealous fears which, before we were
affianced, had made me tremble at the thought of
separation, and had conjured up irresistible rivals.
But it was with a settled heavy gloom that I saw
her depart. From earth was gone a glory; from
life a blessing.

CHAPTER XX.

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 reinvigoration of the human system by
principles similar to those which Liebig has
applied to the replenishment of an exhausted
soil—viz. 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 neutralising or counterbalancing that in which
it superabounds—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
Müller, 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 occupa-
tion 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 MS. 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 Müller 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?"*

* Müller's Elements of Physiology, vol. ii. p. 134.
Translated by Dr. Baley.

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;