my advice was sought even by patients from the metropolis.
That ambition, which, conceived in early youth, had decided my career
and sweetened all its labours,--the ambition to take a rank and leave
a name as one of the great pathologists to whom humanity accords a
grateful, if calm, renown,--saw before it a level field and a certain
goal.

I know not whether a success far beyond that usually attained at the age
I had reached served to increase, but it seemed to myself to justify,
the main characteristic of my moral organization,--intellectual pride.

Though mild and gentle to the sufferers under my care, as a necessary
element of professional duty, I was intolerant of contradiction from
those who belonged to my calling, or even from those who, in general
opinion, opposed my favourite theories. I had espoused a school of
medical philosophy severely rigid in its inductive logic. My creed was
that of stern materialism. I had a contempt for the understanding of men
who accepted with credulity what they could not explain by reason. My
favourite phrase was "common-sense." At the same time I had no prejudice
against bold discovery, and discovery necessitates conjecture, but
I dismissed as idle all conjecture that could not be brought to a
practical test.

As in medicine I had been the pupil of Broussais, so in metaphysics I
was the disciple of Condillac. I believed with that philosopher that
"all our knowledge we owe to Nature; that in the beginning we can
only instruct ourselves through her lessons; and that the whole art of
reasoning consists in continuing as she has compelled us to commence."
Keeping natural philosophy apart from the doctrines of revelation, I
never assailed the last; but I contended that by the first no accurate
reasoner could arrive at the existence of the soul as a third principle
of being equally distinct from mind and body. That by a miracle man
might live again, was a question of faith and not of understanding. I
left faith to religion, and banished it from philosophy. How define with
a precision to satisfy the logic of philosophy what was to live again?
The body? We know that the body rests in its grave till by the process
of decomposition its elemental parts enter into other forms of
matter. The mind? But the mind was as clearly the result of the bodily
organization as the music of the harpsichord is the result of the
instrumental mechanism. The mind shared the decrepitude of the body in
extreme