occiput, reads the inventory of his fortunes and
character. The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent
knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but they
are:--Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!--But
the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence.
What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not
willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the
occasion to profane them. I saw a gracious gentleman who adapts his
conversation to the form of the head of the man he talks with! I had
fancied that the value of life lay in its inscrutable possibilities; in
the fact that I never know, in addressing myself to a new individual,
what may befall me. I carry the keys of my castle in my hand, ready to
throw them at the feet of my lord, whenever and in what disguise
soever he shall appear. I know he is in the neighborhood hidden among
vagabonds. Shall I preclude my future by taking a high seat and kindly
adapting my conversation to the shape of heads? When I come to that, the
doctors shall buy me for a cent.--'But, sir, medical history; the report
to the Institute; the proven facts!'--I distrust the facts and
the inferences. Temperament is the veto or limitation-power in the
constitution, very justly applied to restrain an opposite excess in the
constitution, but absurdly offered as a bar to original equity. When
virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep. On its own level,
or in view of nature, temperament is final. I see not, if one be once
caught in this trap of so-called sciences, any escape for the man from
the links of the chain of physical necessity. Given such an embryo,
such a history must follow. On this platform one lives in a sty of
sensualism, and would soon come to suicide. But it is impossible that
the creative power should exclude itself. Into every intelligence there
is a door which is never closed, through which the creator passes. The
intellect, seeker of absolute truth, or the heart, lover of absolute
good, intervenes for our succor, and at one whisper of these high powers
we awake from ineffectual struggles with this nightmare. We hurl it into
its own hell, and cannot again contract ourselves to so base a state.

The secret of the illusoriness is in the necessity of a succession
of moods or objects. Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is
quicksand. This onward trick of nature is too