A Strange Story — Volume 08

My Work, my Philosophical Work-the ambitious hope of my intellectual life--how eagerly I returned to it again! Far away from my household grief, far away from my haggard perplexities--neither a Lilian nor a Margrave there! As I went over what I had before written, each link in its chain of reasoning seemed so serried, that to alter one were to derange all; and the whole reasoning was so opposed to the possibility of the wonders I myself had experienced, so hostile to the subtle hypotheses of a Faber, or the childlike belief of an Amy, that I must have destroyed the entire work if I had admitted such contradictions to its design! But the work was I myself!--I, in my solid, sober, healthful mind, before the brain had been perplexed by a phantom. Were phantoms to be allowed as testimonies against science? No; in returning to my Book, I returned to my former Me!