t a man's individuality should swing round
from pole to pole, and yet that one life should contain these two
contradictory personalities--is it not a wondrous thing?

I ask myself, where is the man, the very, very inmost essence of the
man? See how much you may subtract from him without touching it. It does
not lie in the limbs which serve him as tools, nor in the apparatus by
which he is to digest, nor in that by which he is to inhale oxygen. All
these are mere accessories, the slaves of the lord within. Where,
then, is he? He does not lie in the features which are to express his
emotions, nor in the eyes and ears which can be dispensed with by the
blind and deaf. Nor is he in the bony framework which is the rack over
which nature hangs her veil of flesh. In none of these things lies the
essence of the man. And now what is left? An arched whitish putty-like
mass, some fifty odd ounces in weight, with a number of white filaments
hanging down from it, looking not unlike the medusae which float in our
summer seas. But these filaments only serve to conduct nerve force
to muscles and to organs which serve secondary purposes. They may
themselves therefore be disregarded. Nor can we stop here in our
elimination. This central mass of nervous matter may be pared down on
all sides before we seem to get at the very seat of the soul. Suicides
have shot away the front lobes of the brain, and have lived to repent
it. Surgeons have cut down upon it and have removed sections. Much of it
is merely for the purpose of furnishing the springs of motion, and much
for the reception of impressions. All this may be put aside as we search
for the physical seat of what we call the soul--the spiritual part of
the man. And what is left then? A little blob of matter, a handful of
nervous dough, a few ounces of tissue, but there--somewhere there--lurks
that impalpable seed, to which the rest of our frame is but the pod. The
old philosophers who put the soul in the pineal gland were not right,
but after all they were uncommonly near the mark.

You'll find my physiology even worse than my theology, Bertie. I have
a way of telling stories backwards to you, which is natural enough when
you consider that I always sit down to write under the influence of the
last impressions which have come upon me. All this talk about the soul
and the brain arises simply from the fact that I have been spending the
last few weeks with a lunatic. And how it came about I wi