The Stark Munro Letters IV - Home, 1st December, 1881

Lyn Thompson (0:00)

Chapter 4 of The Stark Munro Letters This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by Lyn Thompson The Stark Munro Letters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Chapter 4 Home 1st December 1881 I may be doing you an injustice, Bertie, but it seemed to me in your last that there were indications that the free expression of my religious views had been distasteful to you, that you should disagree with me, I am prepared for, but that you should object to free and honest discussion of those subjects which above all others men should be honest over, would, I confess, be a disappointment. The free thinker is placed at this disadvantage in ordinary society, that whereas it would be considered very bad taste upon his part to obtrude his unorthodox opinion, no such consideration hampers those with whom he disagrees. There was a time when it took a brave man to be a Christian, now it takes a brave man not to be. But, if we are to wear a gag and hide our thoughts when writing in confidence to our most intimate, no, but I won't believe it. You and I have put up too many thoughts together and chased them wherever they would double, Bertie. So just write to me like a good fellow and tell me that I am an ass. Until I have that comforting assurance, I shall place a quarantine upon everything which could conceivably be offensive to you.

Does not lunacy strike you, Bertie, as being a very eerie thing? It is a disease of the soul. To think that you may have a man of noble mind, full of every lofty aspiration, and that a gross physical cause such as the fall of a spikule of bone from the inner table of his skull, onto the surface of the membrane which covers his brain, may have the ultimate effect of turning him into an obscene creature with every bestial attribute. That a man's individuality should swing round from pole to pole, and yet that one life should contain those two contradictory personalities. Is it not a wondrous thing? I ask myself, where is the man, the very, very inmost essence of the man? See how much you may subtract from him without touching it. It does not lie in the limbs which serve him as tools, nor in the apparatus by which he is to digest, nor in that by which he is to inhale oxygen. All these are mere accessories, the slaves of the Lord within. Where then is he?

He does not lie in the features which are to express his emotions, nor in the eyes and ears which can be dispensed with by the blind and deaf, nor is he in the bony framework which is the rack over which nature hangs her bale of flesh. In none of these things lies the essence of the man, and now what is left? An arched, whitish, putty-like mass, some fifty odd ounces in weight, with a number of white filaments hanging down from it, looking not unlike a medusa which float in our summer seas. But these filaments only serve to conduct nerve force to muscles and to organs which serve secondary purposes.

They may themselves therefore be disregarded. Nor can we stop here in our elimination. This central mass of nervous matter may be pared down on all sides before we seem to get at the very seat of the soul. Suicides have shot away the front lobes of the brain, and have lived to repent it. Surgeons have cut down upon it and have removed sections. Much of it is merely for the purpose of furnishing the springs of motion, and much for the reception of impressions. All this may be put aside as we search for the physical seat of what we call the soul, the spiritual part of the man. And what is left then? A little blob of matter, a handful of nervous dough, a few ounces of tissue, but there, somewhere there, lurks that impalpable seat to which the rest of our fame is but the pod. The old philosophers who put the soul in the pineal gland were not right, but after all they were uncommonly near the mark.

You'll find my physiology even worse than my theology, Bertie. I have a way of telling stories backwards to you, which is natural enough when you consider that I always sit down to write under the influence of the last impressions which have come upon me. All this talk about the soul and the brain arises simply from the fact that I have been spending the last few weeks with a lunatic, and how it came about I will tell you as clearly as I can.