I believed that, though the brain were to be
removed from a human skull, the subject would not die, although he
would certainly be divested of the intelligence which governed all
save the purely involuntary actions of his body.

"Once more: a profound study of history from the sociological point of
view, and a not inconsiderable practical experience of human nature,
had convinced me that the greatest geniuses that ever existed were on
a plane not so very far removed above the level of average intellect.
The grandest peaks in my native country, those which all the world
knows by name, tower only a few hundred feet above the countless
unnamed peaks that surround them. Napoleon Bonaparte towered only a
little over the ablest men around him. Yet that little was everything,
and he overran Europe. A man who surpassed Napoleon, as Napoleon
surpassed Murat, in the mental qualities which transmute thought into
fact, would have made himself master of the whole world.

"Now, to fuse these three propositions in to one: suppose that I take
a man, and, by removing the brain that enshrines all the errors and
failures of his ancestors away back to the origin of the race, remove
all sources of weakness in his future career. Suppose, that in place
of the fallible intellect which I have removed, I endow him with an
artificial intellect that operates with the certainty of universal
laws. Suppose that I launch this superior being, who reasons truly,
into the hurly burly of his inferiors, who reason falsely, and await
the inevitable result with the tranquillity of a philosopher.

"Monsieur, you have my secret. That is precisely what I have done. In
Moscow, where my friend Dr. Duchat had charge of the new institution
of St. Vasili for hopeless idiots, I found a boy of eleven whom they
called Stepan Borovitch. Since he was born, he had not seen, heard,
spoken or thought. Nature had granted him, it was believed, a fraction
of the sense of smell, and perhaps a fraction of the sense of taste,
but of even this there was no positive ascertainment. Nature had
walled in his soul most effectually. Occasional inarticulate
murmurings, and an incessant knitting and kneading of the fingers were
his only manifestations of energy. On bright days they would place him
in a little rocking-chair, in some spot where the sun fell warm, and
he would rock to and fro for hours, working his slender fingers and
mumbling forth his satisfaction at the warmth in the pl