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that at the moment of its occurrence, the peculiar passion of the scene-its grief, its terror, or its fury—has seized with unwonted power on the actor's sensibilities, and passed, unconsciously perhaps to him, into his face and voice.

GAR. You have well supported your theory, Mr. Lewes, but you must not think that my silence means your victory. Those who practise an art are unaccustomed to pay attention to its inward processes, and are often ill at explaining them. I would fain hear you argue the matter with M. Diderot.

LEW. I shall gladly do so, sir: but I would not have you expect that, after having held my own against your experience, I shall yield to his theories.

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LUCRETIUS, PALEY AND DARWIN.

Luc. It is enough: I would leave you. I go to sit at the feet of my master Epicurus, from whom men first learnt to shake off the chains of superstition, and to see in the universe the frame and fashionings of eternal matter. Why would you detain me?

DAR. I would detain you, Lucretius, to question you further upon your doctrine of atoms.

PAL. And I to learn from you how you reconcile your presence here with your theory of the materiality of the soul.

DAR. Nay, Dr. Paley; it is surely rather for us to reconcile those powers of speech which we are now exercising, with the theory of the immateriality of the soul. So long as we retain such powers we must certainly account our nature to be in some sense material. For all that we speak of ourselves as disembodied spirits, our life in the Shades can be only a continuation under physical, if highly etherealised, conditions of our life on earth.

LUC. Thou art right, O greatest of the philosophers; and it doth in no wise shake the Epicurean argument that we have prolonged our conscious existence for a certain period beyond its terrestrial span.

PAL. I perceive, then, that you are incorrigible in your atheism, and that we must await the time appointed by God for its correction and chastisement. Do you, in your impious audacity, accept those terms of maintaining it? LUC. I could not decline them if I would.

PAL. Ay, but I mean do you accept them confidently? Do you accept them without misgiving?

LUC. If I have rightly judged of the Divine nature the gods will concern themselves as little with my atheism as with any other of the affairs of men. If I have judged wrongly of it, I know not what that nature is, and I cannot tell, therefore, whether the gods are any more likely to punish atheism than to reward it.

PAL. You had no reverence even for the gods whom you imagined.

LUC. Had I not? Yet I thought I spoke of them with I find nothing at least of irreverence in this :

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"Omnis enim per se Divôm natura necesse est
Immortali ævo summâ cum pace fruatur,
Semota ab nostris rebus, sejunctaque longe;
Nam, privata dolore omni, privata periclis,
Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri,

Nec bene promeritis capitur, nec tangitur irâ.”

Nor is this, I think, a contemptuous description of the blessed calm of their abodes :

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PAL. The lines, adapted, by the by from Homer, are certainly elegant. But I have never denied you the praise of an ingenious poet. Your condemnation, however, will be the heavier on that account.

LUC. Do the gods then hate good verses?

PAL. No; but they love not those who abuse good gifts. Your very skill in composition ('tis the same word "condere" both for the building up of a poem and of the universe) should have taught you to believe in the Divine Artificer of things. How would you have liked the men of my time to refer your own hexameters to a "fortuitous concourse of dactyls and spondees"?

LUC. I should not, at any rate, have punished them for their error; though I am more concerned about my fame as a poet than the gods seem to be about their reputation as architects.

DAR. May we not say too, Dr. Paley, that posterity would have thus much less excuse for their scepticism that they are familiar as a matter of experience with the fact that poems originate in human design ?

PAL. Were you a poet yourself, Mr. Darwin ?

DAR. Not I, indeed. I spent my life in scientific inquiry. PAL. There was a namesake of yours whom I remember as the author of some pleasing verse.

DAR. He was my grandfather, sir; and I am glad his poetical compositions met with your approval. But why did you mention him? Were it not that you have praised verse so clear and intelligible as his, I should have feared that you were about to question my theory as to the origin of poetry.

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PAL. Its origin in what?

DAR. In human design: for I must own, sir, that I sometimes find a difficulty in tracing modern poetry to any such source. The concourse of the words composing it too often appears to me, at least, to be purely fortuitous. PAL. I should, nevertheless, hesitate for my part to infer from the absence of any marks of human purpose that such poetry is of divine origin.

DAR. I exercise a similar caution, Dr. Paley. But let us return to our great poet here-for I think you admit his greatness-and see how your argument has affected him. What says he to it?

LUC. That it is trifling with the matter. We have experience of men composing poems, but no one has seen the gods at work upon the universe.

PAL. What need of that? No one but your acquaintances ever saw you at work on the De Rerum Naturâ, but no one doubts that it was written by a man; and if you say that they reason from the analogy of other poems which they know in fact to be the work of intelligence, I answer that really the same analogy is to be found in the works of creation.

LUC. If that is your argument I have misunderstood your theory. I did not know that you believed the world to be the work of an intelligent man.

PAL. It is you, Epicurean, who are trifling now. LUC. Why, what more does the argument prove? PAL. Much more. The contrivance which we nature is like in kind to the ingenuity of an intelligent man, but infinitely greater in degree; and hence we infer

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