Book: A Strange Story, Volume 2.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 2.




"I--I! die one day--die!" and he sank on the grass, and buried his face
amongst the herbage, sobbing aloud.

Before I could get through half a dozen words I meant to soothe, he had
once more bounded up, dashed the tears from his eyes, and was again
singing some wild, barbaric chant. Abstracting itself from the appeal to
its outward sense by melodies of which the language was unknown, my mind
soon grew absorbed in meditative conjectures on the singular nature, so
wayward, so impulsive, which had forced intimacy on a man grave and
practical as myself.

I was puzzled how to reconcile so passionate a childishness, so
undisciplined a want of self-control, with an experience of mankind so
extended by travel, with an education desultory and irregular indeed, but
which must, at some time or other, have been familiarized to severe
reasonings and laborious studies. In Margrave there seemed to be wanting
that mysterious something which is needed to keep our faculties, however
severally brilliant, harmoniously linked together,--as the string by
which a child mechanically binds the wildflowers it gathers, shaping them
at choice into the garland or the chain.

[1] "According to the views we have mentioned, we must ascribe life to a
gas, that is, to an aeriform body."--Liebig: "Organic Chemistry,"
Mayfair's translation, p.363.--It is perhaps not less superfluous to add
that Liebig does not support the views "according to which life must be
ascribed to a gas," than it would be to state, had Dugald Stewart been
quoted as writing, "According to the views we have mentioned the mind is
but a bundle of impressions," that Dugald Stewart was not supporting, but
opposing, the views of David Hume. The quotation is merely meant to show,
in the shortest possible compass, that there are views entertained by
speculative reasoners of our day which, according to Liebig, would lead to
the inference at which Margrave so boldly arrives. Margrave is, however,
no doubt, led to his belief by his reminiscences of Van Helmont, to whose
discovery of gas he is referring. Van Helmont plainly affirms "that the
arterial spirit of our life is of the nature of a gas;" and in the same
chapter (on the fiction of elementary complexions and mixtures) says,
"Seeing that the spirit of our life, since it is a gas, is most mightily
and swiftly affected by any other gas," etc. He repeats the same dogma in
his treatise on "Long Life," and indeed very generally throughout his
writings, observing, in his chapter on the Vital Air, that the spirit of
life is a salt, sharp vapour, made of the arterial blood, etc. Liebig,
therefore, in confuting some modern notions as to the nature of contagion
by miasma, is leading their reasonings back to that assumption in the
Brawn of physiological science by which the discoverer of gas exalted into
the principle of life the substance to which he first gave the name, now
so familiarly known. It is nevertheless just to Van Helmont to add that
his conception of the vital principle was very far from being as purely
materialistic as it would seem to those unacquainted with his writings;
for he carefully distinguishes that principle of life which he ascribes to
a gas, and by which he means the sensuous animal life, from the
intellectual immortal principle of soul. Van Helmont, indeed, was a
sincere believer of Divine Revelation. "The Lord Jesus is the way, the
truth, and the life," says with earnest humility this daring genius, in
that noble chapter "On the completing of the mind by the 'prayer of
silence,' and the loving offering tip of the heart, soul, and strength to
the obedience of the Divine will," from which some of the most eloquent of
recent philosophers, arguing against materialism, have borrowed largely in
support and in ornament of their lofty cause.

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