A Strange Story — Volume 05Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
Science
A Strange Story — Volume 05
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
"This person, a seeker after an occult philosophy, which had possibly
acquainted him with some secrets in nature beyond the pale of our
conventional experience, though, when analyzed, they might prove to be
quite reconcilable with sober science, startles you with an undefined
mysterious charge against the young man who had previously seemed to you
different from ordinary mortals. In a room stored with the dead things of
the brute soulless world, your brain becomes intoxicated with the fumes of
some vapour which produces effects not uncommon in the superstitious
practices of the East; your brain, thus excited, brings distinctly before
you the vague impressions it had before received. Margrave becomes
identified with the Louis Grayle of whom you had previously heard an
obscure and, legendary tale, and all the anomalies in his character are
explained by his being that which you had contended, in your physiological
work, it was quite possible for man to be,--namely, mind and body without
soul! You were startled by the monster which man would be were your own
theory possible; and in order to reconcile the contradictions in this very
monster, you account for knowledge, and for powers that mind without soul
could not have attained, by ascribing to this prodigy broken memories of a
former existence, demon attributes from former proficiency in evil magic.
My friend, there is nothing here which your own study of morbid
idiosyncracies should not suffice to solve."
"So, then," said I, "you would reduce all that have affected my senses as
realities into the deceit of illusions? But," I added, in a whisper,
terrified by my own question, "do not physiologists agree in this: namely,
that though illusory phantasms may haunt the sane as well as the insane,
the sane know that they are only illusions, and the insane do not."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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