A Strange Story | Page 6

and a gentleman,
but he gives himself airs,--the Hill does not allow any airs but its own.
Besides, he is a new comer: resistance to new corners, and, indeed, to
all things new, except caps and novels, is one of the bonds that keep old
established societies together. Accordingly, it is by my advice that Dr.
Lloyd has taken Abbots' House; the rent would be too high for his
means if the Hill did not feel bound in honour to justify the trust he has
placed in its patronage. I told him that all my friends, when they were
in want of a doctor, would send for him; those who are my friends will
do so. What the Hill does, plenty of common people down there will do
also,--so that question is settled!" And it was settled.
Dr. Lloyd, thus taken by the hand, soon extended the range of his visits
beyond the Hill, which was not precisely a mountain of gold to doctors,
and shared with myself, though in a comparatively small degree, the
much more lucrative practice of Low Town.
I had no cause to grudge his success, nor did I. But to my theories of
medicine his diagnosis was shallow, and his prescriptions obsolete.
When we were summoned to a joint consultation, our views as to the
proper course of treatment seldom agreed. Doubtless he thought I ought
to have deferred to his seniority in years; but I held the doctrine which
youth deems a truth and age a paradox,--namely, that in science the
young men are the practical elders, inasmuch as they are schooled in

the latest experiences science has gathered up, while their seniors are
cramped by the dogmas they were schooled to believe when the world
was some decades the younger.
Meanwhile my reputation continued rapidly to advance; it became
more than local; 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 old age, and in the full vigour of youth a sudden injury
to the brain might forever destroy the intellect of a Plato or a
Shakspeare. But the third principle,--the soul,--the something lodged
within the body, which yet was to survive it? Where was that soul
hidden out of the ken of the anatomist? When philosophers attempted
to define it, were they not compelled to confound its nature and its