"Nothing!" repeated Alwyn, with an air of resigned hopelessness;
"for I learned that, according to the results arrived at by the
most advanced thinkers of the day, there was no God, no Soul, no
Hereafter--the loftiest efforts of the highest heaven--aspiring
minds were doomed to end in non-fruition, failure, and
annihilation. Among all the desperately hard truths that came
rattling down upon me like a shower of stones, I think this was
the crowning one that killed whatever genius I had. I use the word
'genius' foolishly--though, after all, genius itself is nothing to
boast of, since it is only a morbid and unhealthy condition of the
intellectual faculties, or at least was demonstrated to me as such
by a scientific friend of my own who, seeing I was miserable, took
great pains to make me more so if possible. He proved,--to his own
satisfaction if not altogether to mine,--that the abnormal
position of certain molecules in the brain produced an
eccentricity or peculiar bias in one direction which, practically
viewed, might be described as an intelligent form of monomania,
but which most people chose to term 'genius,' and that from a
purely scientific standpoint it was evident that the poets,
painters, musicians, sculptors, and all the widely renowned 'great
ones' of the earth should be classified as so many brains more or
less affected by abnormal molecular formation, which strictly
speaking amounted to brain-deformity. He assured me, that to the
properly balanced, healthily organized brain of the human animal,
genius was an impossibility--it was a malady as unnatural as rare.
'And it is singular, very singular,' he added with a complacent
smile, 'that the world should owe all its finest art and
literature merely to a few varieties of molecular disease!' I
thought it singular enough, too,--however, I did not care to argue