“My dear sir, look about you. Side by side with material progress, with perfected inventions and conquest of disease, how much have our morals improved? How much have our vanities diminished? Do men and women grow more and more faithful to that sacrament? Do our cities grow more and more pure, and free from the taint of perversion? With our much-vaunted inheritance of art and culture, what has become of the freedom of the will, which was said to be the supreme good in that inheritance?” “Well,” I said, “you are not saying anything new; we all know that! What are you going to do about it? You Ibsens are wonderful diagnosticians, but what we want is a cure!” “That is only a quibble, if indeed it is not nonsense,” answered the strange professor, “for then you admit that we have not freedom of the will, that there is no such thing; well, my friend, I heartily agree with you. It is not a question of free will with us, it is a question of strength of will and weakness of will, which is purely a matter of fate.” “Surely you are not a fatalist!” I exclaimed. “Yes, sir, every inch a fatalist. You doubt my faith in my convictions, I see? Would you like me to prove them to you by supernatural means?” Here the man leered at me with defiance, and I grew uneasy and longed for Sandy’s return. “Proceed if you wish;” I said, folding my arms. “My dear sir,” he began, rising and holding out his hand for me to clasp, “can I trust you? If you do not wish to believe me, may I prove my position to you by a discovery for which I searched a lifetime, an invention on which I lavished the slavery of years, an invention whose workings may warp your credulity until you doubt my sanity and your own. Can I trust you with my secret? I have the instrument in that valise. That is why I have walked up the seven flights of stairs, because the elevator’s motion would upset its delicate mechanism. Can I trust you?” “Proceed if you wish;” I said, without taking his hand, for there was something uncanny about the man in his present state. “Listen to me. I may be a trifle long, but if you knew how I am enjoying myself, yes, how I am relieving my brain by detaining you! I say relieving my brain, for it is about pent-up brains that I am about to speak. Have you ever thought that when each one of us dies, how many facts, memories, griefs, joys, are enclosed in the folds of our brain? How our skull is literally the storehouse of all we knew, felt and experienced. That in there, it was; and that in there, it must be? I have spent hours roaming through museums in which mummies were exposed; I have spent still more hours passing through cemeteries where the countless dead, known and unknown, lie. What if their skulls could be tapped? I asked myself, would we not find a few ideas, perhaps, which had filtered to the bone and survived alone of all the mind that was?