pride.

Though mild and gentle to the sufferers under my care, as a necessary
element of professional duty, I was intolerant of contradiction from
those who belonged to my calling, or even from those who, in general
opinion, opposed my favourite theories. I had espoused a school of
medical philosophy severely rigid in its inductive logic. My creed was
that of stern materialism. I had a contempt for the understanding of men
who accepted with credulity what they could not explain by reason. My
favourite phrase was "common-sense." At the same time I had no prejudice
against bold discovery, and discovery necessitates conjecture, but
I dismissed as idle all conjecture that could not be brought to a
practical test.

As in medicine I had been the pupil of Broussais, so in
metaphysics I was the disciple of Condillac. I believed with that
philosopher that "all our knowledge we owe to Nature; that in the
beginning we can only instruct ourselves through her lessons; and that
the whole art of reasoning consists in continuing as she has compelled us
to commence." Keeping natural philosophy apart from the doctrines of
revelation, I never assailed the last; but I contended that by the first
no accurate reasoner could arrive at the existence of the soul as a third
principle of being equally distinct from mind and body. That by a
miracle man might live again, was a question of faith and not of
understanding. I left faith to religion, and banished it from
philosophy. How define with a precision to satisfy the logic of
philosophy what was to live again? The body? We know that the
body rests in its grave till by the process of decomposition its
elemental parts enter into other forms of matter. The mind? But the
mind was as clearly the result of the bodily organization as the music of