The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

suited, indeed, in leaving me more sceptical than
before. I had been advised to study Cousin. I
studied him in his own works as well as in those of
his European and American echoes. The 'Charles
Elwood' of Mr. Brownson, for example, was placed
in my hands. I read it with profound attention.
Throughout I found it logical, but the portions which
were not merely logical were unhappily the initial
arguments of the disbelieving hero of the book. In
his summing up it seemed evident to me that the
reasoner had not even succeeded in convincing himself. His end had plainly forgotten his beginning,
like the government of Trinculo. In short, I was not
long in perceiving that if man is to be intellectually
convinced of his own immortality, he will never be so
convinced by the mere abstractions which have been
so long the fashion of the moralists of England, of
France, and of Germany. Abstractions may amuse
and exercise, but take no hold on the mind. Here
upon earth, at least, philosophy, I am persuaded, will
always in vain call upon us to look upon qualities as
things. The will may assent - the soul - the intellect,
never.
"I repeat, then, that I only half felt, and never
intellectually believed. But latterly there has been a
certain deepening of the feeling, until it has come so
nearly to resemble the acquiescence of reason, that I
find it difficult to distinguish between the two. I am
enabled, too, plainly to trace this effect to the mesmeric
influence. I cannot better explain my meaning than
by the hypothesis that the mesmeric exaltation enables
me to perceive a train of ratiocination which, in my
abnormal existence, convinces, but which, in full
accordance with the mesmeric phenomena, does not
310