hour.

Mrs Allmash.  It is so refreshing to meet any one so full of information and earnestness as you are, in this wicked, jaded London.  Please go on, Mr Rollestone; what you were saying was so interesting.  Have you really been experimentalising on your own moral organism?  How quite too extraordinary!

Lord Fondleton [aside to Mrs Gloring].  By Jove!  I had no idea old Rollestone could come out in this line.  He is a regular dark horse.  I should never have suspected it.  He will be first favourite in London this season, and win in a canter.

Coldwaite.  You will excuse me, Mr Rollestone, but I really am interested, and I really am serious.  It was with no idle curiosity that I was waiting to hear your answer to Mr Germsell’s inquiry, as to the nature of the moral experiment necessary to test the character of this unseen force.

Rollestone.  I can only say that any experiment which deals with the affectional and emotional part of one’s nature must be painful in the extreme.  There is, indeed, only one motive

which would induce one to undergo the trials, sufferings, sacrifices, and ordeals which it involves—and that is one in which you will sympathise: it is the hope that humanity may benefit by the result of one’s efforts.  Indeed, any lower motive than this would vitiate them.  I will venture to assert to Mr Germsell, who is so sceptical as to the existence of any other quality in that force, which he can only fathom so far as to know that it is physical, that I will put him through a course of experiment which will cause him more acute moral suffering than his brain could bear, unless it was sustained by a force which, by that experimental process, will reveal attributes contained in it not dreamt of in his philosophy.

Germsell.  I have no doubt you could strain my mind until it was weak enough to believe anything, even your fantastic theories.  Thank you, I would rather continue to experiment with my own microscope and forceps than let you experiment either upon my affections or my brains.

Fussle [aside to Mr Rollestone].  You could not make anything of them even if he consented—the former don’t exist, and the

latter are mere putty—but I can quite understand your desire to begin in corpore vili.

Lord Fondleton [aside to Mrs Gloring].  Allow me freely to offer you my affections as peculiarly adapted to experiments of this nature.

Rollestone.  It has always struck me as strange that men of science, who don’t shrink from testing, for instance, the value of poisons, or the nature of disease, by heroically subjecting their own external organisms to their action, should shrink from experimenting on that essential if remote vitalising force, which can only be reached by moral experiment, and disorder in which produces not only moral obliquity and mental alienation, but physical disease as well.

Fussle.  Thus a man may die of apoplexy brought on by a fit of passion.  Cure his temper, and you lessen the danger of apoplexy; that, I take it, is an illustration of what you mean.

Rollestone.  In its most external application it is; the question is where his bad temper comes from, and whether, as Mr Germsell would maintain, it is entirely due to his cerebral

condition, and not to the moral qualities inherent in the force, which, acting on peculiar cerebral conditions, causes one man’s temper to differ from another’s.  It is not the liberated force which generates the temper.  For that you have to go farther back; and the reason why research is limited in this direction is not because it is impossible to go farther back, but because it must inevitably entail, as I have already said, acute personal suffering.  Nor, as these experiments must be purely personal, and involve experiences of an entirely novel kind, is it possible to discuss them except with those who have participated in them.  One might as well attempt to describe the emotion of love to a man whose affections had never been called forth.  If I have alluded to them so fully now, it is because they justify me in making the assertion, for which I can offer no other proof than they have afforded to me personally, that a force does exist in nature possessing an inherent spiritual potency—I use the word spiritual for lack of a better—which is capable of lifting humanity to a higher moral plane of daily living and acting than that which it has hitherto attained.  But I fear

I am trespassing on your patience in having said thus much.

Lady Fritterly.  Oh no, Mr Rollestone; please go on.  There is something so delightfully fresh and original in all you are saying, I can’t tell you how much you interest me.

Germsell [aside].  I know a milkmaid quite as fresh and rather more original.  [Aloud, looking at his watch.]  Bless me! it is past six, and I have an appointment at the club at six.  So sorry to tear myself away, dear Lady Fritterly.  I can’t tell you how I have enjoyed the intellectual treat you have provided for me.

Lady Fritterly.  I thank you so much for coming.  I hope you will often look in on our Sundays.  I think, you know, that these little conversations are so very improving.

Germsell.  You may rely upon me; it is impossible to imagine anything more interesting.  [Mutters as he leaves the room.]  No, Lady Fritterly, this is the last time I enter this house, except perhaps to dinner.  You don’t catch me again making one of your Sunday afternoon collection of bores and idiots.  What an insufferable prig that Rollestone is!

Fussle [aside to Drygull].  Thank heaven, that pompous nuisance has taken himself off!

Drygull [aside to Fussle].  I don’t know which I dislike most—the Pharisee of science or the Pharisee of religion.

Rollestone.  If, then, you admit that the human organism not only cannot generate force, but that the emotions which control the body are in their turn generated by a force which is behind it, and that this force is dependent for its manifestation on its own special conditions, as well as on those of its transmitting organic medium, I venture to assert that experiment in the direction I have suggested will prove to our consciousness that the moral or spiritual quality of the original invading force is a pure one, and that the degree of its pollution in the human frame is the effect of inherited and other organic conditions; and the question which presents itself to the experimentalist is, whether by an effort of the will this same force may not be evoked to change and purify those conditions.  Indeed the very effort is in itself an invocation, and if made unflinchingly, will not fail to meet with a response.  Much that has heretofore been

to earnest seekers unknowable will become knowable, and a love, Mr Coldwaite, higher, if that be possible, than the love of humanity, yet correlative with and inseparable from it, will be found pressing with an irresistible potency into those vacant spaces of the human heart, which have from all time yearned for a closer contact with the Great Source of all love and of all force.  It is in this attempt to sever the love of humanity from its Author, that the Positivist philosophy has failed: it is the worship of a husk without the kernel, of a body without the soul; and hence it will never satisfy the human aspiration.  That aspiration is ever the same; it needs, if you will