ilosopher nothing
is wonderful, or else you may say all things are equally so. The
commonest and so-called simplest fact in the entire order of nature is
precisely as marvellous and incomprehensible at bottom as the most
uncommon and startling. You will pardon me if I say that it is only to
the unscientific that it seems otherwise. But really, my dear sir, my
process for the extirpation of thoughts was but the most obvious
consequence of the discovery that different classes of sensations and
ideas are localized in the brain, and are permanently identified with
particular groups of corpuscles of the grey matter. As soon as that was
known, the extirpating of special clusters of thoughts became merely a
question of mechanical difficulties to be overcome, merely a nice problem
in surgery, and not more complex than many which my brethren have solved
in lithotomy and lithotrity, for instance."

"I suppose what makes the idea a little more startling," said Henry, "is
the odd intermingling of moral and physical conceptions in the idea of
curing pangs of conscience by a surgical operation."

"I should think that intermingling ought not to be very bewildering,"
replied the doctor, "since it is the usual rule. Why is it more curious
to cure remorse by a physical act than to cause remorse by a physical
act? And I believe such is the origin of most remorse."

"Yes," said Henry, still struggling to preserve his mental equilibrium
against this general overturning of his prejudices. "Yes, but the mind
consents to the act which causes the remorse, and I suppose that is what
gives it a moral quality."

"Assuredly," replied the doctor; "and I take it for granted that patients
don't generally come to me unless they have experienced very genuine and
profound regret and sorrow for the act they wish to forget. They have
already repented it, and, according to every theory of moral
accountability, I believe it is held that repentance balances the moral
accounts. My process, you see then, only completes physically what is
already done morally. The ministers and moralists preach forgiveness and
absolution on repentance, but the perennial fountain of the penitent's
tears testifies how empty and vain such assurances are. I fulfil what
they promise. They tell the penitent he is forgiven. I free him from his
sin. Remorse and shame and wan regret have wielded their cruel sceptres
over human lives from the beginning until now. Seated within the
mys