with the same passion, with the same avidity; and as I discarded my books
when I had assimilated as much of them as my system required, so I
discarded my friends when they ceased to be of use to me. I use the word
"use" in its fullest, not in its limited and twenty-shilling sense. This
reduction of the intellect to the blind unconsciousness of the lower organs
will strike some as a violation of man's best beliefs, and as saying very
little for the particular intellect that can be so reduced. But I am not
sure these people are right. I am inclined to think that as you ascend the
scale of thought to the great minds, these unaccountable impulses,
mysterious resolutions, sudden, but certain knowings, falling whence, or
how it is impossible to say, but falling somehow into the brain, instead of
growing rarer, become more and more frequent; indeed, I think that if the
really great man were to confess to the working of his mind, we should see
him constantly besieged by inspirations ... inspirations! Ah! how human
thought only turns in a circle, and how, when we think we are on the verge
of a new thought, we slip into the enunciation of some time-worn truth. But
I say again, let general principles be waived; it will suffice for the
interest of these pages if it be understood that brain instincts have
always been, and still are, the initial and the determining powers of my
being.

* * * * *

But the studio, where I had been working for the last three or four months
so diligently, became wearisome to me, and for two reasons. First, because
it deprived me of many hours of Marshall's company. Secondly--and the
second reason was the graver--because I was beginning to regard the
delineation of a nymph, or youth bathing, etc., as a very narrow channel to
carry off the strong, full tide of a man's thought. For now thoughts of
love and death, and the hopelessness of life, were in active fermentation