his laws, in _my_ way, all my life,
while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies.
And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell.
Pleasure and pain--bah! What is your theologian's ecstasy but
Mahomet's houri in the dark? This store which men and women set
on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon
them,--the mark of the beast from which they came! Pain, pain and
pleasure, they are for us only so long as we wriggle in the dust.

"You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me.
That is the only way I ever heard of true research going.
I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer,
and got a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible?
You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator,
what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine
the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!
The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow-creature,
but a problem! Sympathetic pain,--all I know of it I remember
as a thing I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted--it was
the one thing I wanted--to find out the extreme limit of plasticity
in a living shape."

"But," said I, "the thing is an abomination--"

"To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter,"
he continued. "The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless
as Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I
was pursuing; and the material has--dripped into the huts yonder.
It is nearly eleven years since we came here, I and Montgomery
and six Kanakas. I remember the green stillness of the island
and the empty ocean about us, as though it was yesterday.
The place seemed waiting for me.

"The stores were landed and the house was built. The Kanakas founded
some huts near the ravine. I went to work here upon what I had brought
with me. There were some disagreeable things happened at first.
I began with a sheep, and killed it after a day and a half by a slip
of the scalpel. I took another sheep, and made a thing of pain and fear
and left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I
had finished it; but when I went to it I was discontented with it.
It remembered me, and was terrified beyond imagination; and it had no
more than the wits of a sheep. The more I looked at it the clumsier
it seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery.
These animals without courage, th