 creation: my eye-balls were starting from their sockets in attending to
the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house
furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing
from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually
increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
    The summer months passed while I was thus engaged, heart and soul, in one
pursuit. It was a most beautiful season; never did the fields bestow a more
plentiful harvest, or the vines yield a more luxuriant vintage: but my eyes were
insensible to the charms of nature. And the same feelings which made me neglect
the scenes around me caused me also to forget those friends who were so many
miles absent, and whom I had not seen for so long a time. I knew my silence
disquieted them; and I well remembered the words of my father: »I know that
while you are pleased with yourself, you will think of us with affection, and we
shall hear regularly from you. You must pardon me if I regard any interruption
in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected.«
    I knew well therefore what would be my father's feelings; but I could not
tear my thoughts from my employment, loathsome in itself, but which had taken an
irresistible hold of my imagination. I wished, as it were, to procrastinate all
that related to my feelings of affection until the great object, which swallowed
up every habit of my nature, should be completed.
    I then thought that my father would be unjust if he ascribed my neglect to
vice, or faultiness on my part; but I am now convinced that he was justified in
conceiving that I should not be altogether free from blame. A human being in
perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow
passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity. I do not think that
the pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule. If the study to which you
apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your
taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that
study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If
this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to
interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been
enslaved; Cæsar would have spared his country; America would have been
discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been
destroyed.
