He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or rather like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. It is again as a true disciple of Freud that Chillingworth scented in his victim the hidden _libido_, which he calls a “strong animal nature,” inherited from his father and mother. Here is another bit of dialogue which is very modern in the same way. Chillingworth is speaking, “He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open knoweth oftentimes but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Your pardon once again, good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence. You, sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined and imbued and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.” “Then I need ask no further;” said the clergyman, somewhat hastily rising from his chair. “You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the soul.” Upon which Dimmesdale rebels. He will not unveil his soul to the doctor of his body. To the suggestions of his enemy he opposes a curious and optimistic philosophy concerning the discovery of secret thoughts. No power, according to him, excepting the divine power, could force a human being to betray his inmost self, whether with words, signs of writing or emblems. On Judgment Day it will be otherwise, but that day the reading of the secret thoughts will be expiatory and, for that reason, not painful but pleasant. According to Dimmesdale, who is fully aware of his condition, there are two kinds of repressed individuals, the timid ones whose weakness forbids confession, and the moralists, the fatalists--we should say the “pragmatists”--who consider silence, hypocrisy, as socially more salutary than avowal. Dimmesdale, from this point of view, is, until his conversion in the forest and at the pillory, what we should call to-day a complete simulator.