suffering affected you in spite of yourself? If, for instance, I think
with concentration of the effect that the blade of my penknife would
have in piercing my flesh, I feel an acute pain as if I had really cut
myself; only the blood is wanting. But the pain comes suddenly, and
startles me like a sharp noise breaking profound silence. Can an idea
cause physical pain?--What do you say to that, eh?"

When he gave utterance to such subtle reflections, we both fell into
artless meditation; we set to work to detect in ourselves the
inscrutable phenomena of the origin of thoughts, which Lambert hoped
to discover in their earliest germ, so as to describe some day the
unknown process. Then, after much discussion, often mixed up with
childish notions, a look would flash from Lambert's eager eyes; he
would grasp my hand, and a word from the depths of his soul would show
the current of his mind.

"Thinking is seeing," said he one day, carried away by some objection
raised as to the first principles of our organization. "Every human
science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by
which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense,
all poetry, like every work of art, proceeds from a swift vision of
things."

He was a spiritualist (as opposed to materialism); but I would venture
to contradict him, using his own arguments to consider the intellect
as a purely physical phenomenon. We both were right. Perhaps the words
materialism and spiritualism express the two faces of the same fact.
His considerations on the substance of the mind led to his accepting,
with a certain pride, the life of privation to which we were condemned
in consequence of our idleness and our indifference to learning. He