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Serviss was profoundly surprised by his chief's attitude He had expected a large, calm, and rather contemptuous reply to his question In place of decision he encountered a doubt, a hesitancy, which betrayed weakness Rudolph Weiss of the bereaved whose judg old, his all-eof sadness swept over hiator was nearing the end of his great usefulness, and that upon the clear blue steel of his intelligence the rust of age had begun to fall Truly the power of his early training, his worship of Kant and his school was still vital

Then he pondered his words "If I were a young ," and recalled that no young man of science had ever devoted himself to it "They all came to it late in life, after bereavement"

The bereaved! The whole stupendous delusion see desire of the bereaved for their beloved The great and goodto adation weakened by sorrow, rasped eagerly at the lying comfort extended to them They were not merely deceived, they developed fraud by their blindness, by their hunger for consolation, and by their crass credulity He was still young enough to have inexorable theories--to be of single-hearted loyalty to his creed To him as a monist, the soul (as an entity apart from the body) did not exist Consciousness was a physical disturbance of the higher nerve centres, and thought a secretion of the brain He acknowledged no line of demarcation between the crystal and the monera--and no chasm (of course) between man and the animals The universe was a unit--and all its forms and forces differentiations of one substance and that substance too mysterious to be analyzed or named In such a philosophy as this there could be no room for any hypothesis which even so much as squinted towards dualism, or that permitted a conception so childish as the persistence of the individuality after death

However, he did not carry his implacable principles into the homes of his friends, and seldoood dinners, the theatre or the drawing-room This fact, from a cynical point of view, proved his faith to have been as truly of his laboratory as that of a bishop, with Spencer and Darwin and Koch and Haeckel as the founders of its articles