The two Voices of my life!  An ordinary person reading my words would undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory impulses—­or else that I rave:  for what modern man could comprehend how real-seeming were those voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I heard them contend within me, with a nearness ‘nearer than breathing,’ as it says in the poem, and ‘closer than hands and feet.’

About the age of seven it happened first to me.  I was playing one summer evening in a pine-wood of my father’s; half a mile away was a quarry-cliff; and as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to me, inside of me:  ‘Just take a walk toward the cliff’; and as if someone else said:  ’Don’t go that way at all’—­mere whispers then, which gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful contention!  I did go toward the cliff:  it was steep, thirty feet high, and I fell.  Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my astonished mother that ‘someone had pushed me’ over the edge, and that someone else ‘had caught me’ at the bottom!

One night, soon after my eleventh birthday, lying in bed, the thought struck me that my life must be of great importance to some thing or things which I could not see; that two Powers, which hated each other, must be continually after me, one wishing for some reason to kill me, and the other for some reason to keep me alive, one wishing me to do so and so, and the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like other boys, but a creature separate, special, marked for—­something.  Already I had notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped; so that such Biblical expressions as ‘The Lord spake to So-and-so, saying’ have hardly ever suggested any question in my mind as to how the Voice was heard:  I did not find it so very difficult to comprehend that originally man had more ears than two; nor should have been surprised to know that I, in these latter days, more or less resembled those primeval ones.

But not a creature, except perhaps my mother, has ever dreamed me what I here state that I was.  I seemed the ordinary youth of my time, bow in my ’Varsity eight, cramming for exams., dawdling in clubs.  When I had to decide as to a profession, who could have suspected the conflict that transacted itself in my soul, while my brain was indifferent to the matter—­that agony of strife with which the brawling voices shouted, the one:  ‘Be a scientist—­a doctor,’ and the other:  ’Be a lawyer, an engineer, an artist—­be anything but a doctor!’

A doctor I became, and went to what had grown into the greatest of medical schools—­Cambridge; and there it was that I came across a man, named Scotland, who had a rather odd view of the world.  He had rooms, I remember, in the New Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally there.  He was always talking about certain ‘Black’ and ’White Powers, till it became absurd, and the men used to call him ‘black-and-white-mystery-man,’ because, one day, when someone said something about ‘the black mystery of the universe,’ Scotland interrupted him with the words:  ‘the black-and-white mystery.’