d 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
lo