CHAPTER LXXIV.

My Work, my Philosophical Work-the ambitious hope of my intellectual
life--how eagerly I returned to it again! Far away from my household
grief, far away from my haggard perplexities--neither a Lilian nor a
Margrave there!

As I went over what I had before written, each link in its chain of
reasoning seemed so serried, that to alter one were to derange all; and
the whole reasoning was so opposed to the possibility of the wonders I
myself had experienced, so hostile to the subtle hypotheses of a Faber, or
the childlike belief of an Amy, that I must have destroyed the entire work
if I had admitted such contradictions to its design!

But the work was I myself!--I, in my solid, sober, healthful mind, before
the brain had been perplexed by a phantom. Were phantoms to be allowed as
testimonies against science? No; in returning to my Book, I returned to
my former Me!

How strange is that contradiction between our being as man and our being
as Author! Take any writer enamoured of a system: a thousand things may
happen to him every day which might shake his faith in that system; and
while he moves about as mere man, his faith is shaken. But when he
settles himself back into the phase of his being as author, the mere act
of taking pen in hand and smoothing the paper before him restores his
speculations to their ancient mechanical train. The system, the beloved
system, reasserts its tyrannic sway, and he either ignores, or moulds into
fresh proofs of his theory as author, all which, an hour before, had given
his theory the lie in his living perceptions as man.