He had conceived, that only by limiting the ties of the flesh and trampling love of man from his heart, might one approximate to contentment, fearlessness, and rest. He had supposed that the fewer we love, the less life has power to torment us, and he had envied the passionless, sunless serenity of recorded philosophers and saints. He was glad that, at a time when nature has a large voice in the affairs of the individual and sways him through sense, he had not incurred the customary responsibilities. Chance threw him but a single child; and when the mother of the child was taken from him, he felt a sort of dreary satisfaction that fate could only strike one more vital blow. He had dwarfed his affections obstinately; he had estimated the power of life to inflict further master sorrows, and imagined that by the death of one human creature alone could added suffering come. So at least he believed before the event. And now that creature was actually dead. Out of the ranks of man, the bullet had found and slain his son. Yet, when Mark sank to the grave and the first storm of his passing was stilled in the father's heart, great new facts and information, until then denied, fell upon Humphrey Baskerville's darkness and showed him that even this stroke could not sever his spirit from its kind. The looked-for deliverance did not descend upon him; the universal indifference did not come. Instead his unrest persisted and he found the fabric of his former dream as baseless as all dreaming. Because the alleged saint and the detached philosopher are forms that mask reality; they are poses only possible where the soul suffers from constitutional atrophy or incurred frost-bite. They who stand by the wayside and watch, are freezing to death instead of burning healthily away. Faulty sentience is not sublime; to be gelded of some natural human instinct is not to stand upon the heights. He who lifts a barrier between himself and life, shall be found no more than an unfinished thing. His ambition for detachment is the craving of disease; his content is the content of unconsciousness; his peace is the peace of the mentally infirm. A complete man feels; a complete man suffers with all his tingling senses; a complete man smarts to see the world's negligences, ignorances, brutalities; he endures them as wrongs to himself; and, because he is a complete man, he too blunders and adds his errors to the sum of human tribulation, even while he fights with all his power for the increase of human happiness.