d sit down to
discharge part of my debt, and in half an hour (I look at the watch, and
it says ten minutes) I must go and dress myself for my reading, and here
still will be the nine pages unanswered to-morrow morning, when I must
set off for Manchester.

You talk of the logic of my mind, my dear friend, but my mind has no
logic whatever; and in so far as that is concerned, Calvinism need look
for as little help as hindrance from me. I do not believe I can _think_;
and from the difficulty, not to say impossibility, I find in doing so, I
don't think I would if I could; and if that is not logical, neither is
that most admirable of all chains of reasoning, "Je n'aime pas les
epinards," etc. There, now, here comes my maid to interrupt me, and
there's an end of epistolary correspondence; I must go and dress.

Now it is to-morrow morning, dear Hal, and until the breakfast comes I
can talk a few more words with you.... But don't you know that one
reason why I appear to you to have positive mental results, is because I
have no mental processes? I never think; for, as a lawyer would say,
whenever I do, it seems to me as if there was no proposition (a few
arithmetical and scientific ones excepted _perhaps_, like two and two
are four) which does not admit of its own reverse. I don't say this is
so, but it seems so to me; and whenever I attempt to put the notions
that float through my brain, on which I float comfortably enough over
infinite abysses of inconclusion, into precise form and shape, there is
not one of them that does not seem to be quite controvertible; nor did I
ever utter or assume a position of which I felt most assured while
uttering it, without perceiving almost immediately that it was
assailable on many sides. This is extremely disagreeable to me; the
labor necessary to establish any mental or moral proposition simply on
intellectual grounds, appears to me so great that I hate the very idea
of it, and then I hate myself for my laziness, and wonder if some
"judgment" does not await wits that will not work because work is
tiresome. But if I appear to you to have strong convictions, it is
because I have strong mental and moral impulses, instincts, intuitions,
and never allow myself to weaken them by that most debilitating process,
long-continued questioning, leading to no result.

You ask me what book I read now to put me to sleep--why, Murray's
"Handbook for France;" ditto, for Savoy, Switzerland, and Piedmont;
di