I do not wish to say, by any means, that his so-called autobiography is a mere fairy tale.  It is far from that.  It is amazingly truthful in the character-picture it represents of the man himself.  It is only not reliable—­and it is sometimes even unjust—­as detailed history.  Yet, curiously enough, there were occasional chapters that were photographically exact, and fitted precisely with the more positive, if less picturesque, materials.  It is also true that such chapters were likely to be episodes intrinsically so perfect as to not require the touch of art.

In the talks which we usually had, when the dictations were ended and Miss Hobby had gone, I gathered much that was of still greater value.  Imagination was temporarily dispossessed, as it were, and, whether expounding some theory or summarizing some event, he cared little for literary effect, and only for the idea and the moment immediately present.

It was at such times that he allowed me to make those inquiries we had planned in the beginning, and which apparently had little place in the dictations themselves.  Sometimes I led him to speak of the genesis of his various books, how he had come to write them, and I think there was not a single case where later I did not find his memory of these matters almost exactly in accord with the letters of the moment, written to Howells or Twichell, or to some member of his family.  Such reminiscence was usually followed by some vigorous burst of human philosophy, often too vigorous for print, too human, but as dazzling as a search-light in its revelation.

It was during this earlier association that he propounded, one day, his theory of circumstance, already set down, that inevitable sequence of cause and effect, beginning with the first act of the primal atom.  He had been dictating that morning his story of the clairvoyant dream which preceded his brother’s death, and the talk of foreknowledge had continued.  I said one might logically conclude from such a circumstance that the future was a fixed quantity.

“As absolutely fixed as the past,” he said; and added the remark already quoted.—­[Chap. lxxv] A little later he continued: 

“Even the Almighty Himself cannot check or change that sequence of events once it is started.  It is a fixed quantity, and a part of the scheme is a mental condition during certain moments usually of sleep—­when the mind may reach out and grasp some of the acts which are still to come.”

It was a new angle to me—­a line of logic so simple and so utterly convincing that I have remained unshaken in it to this day.  I have never been able to find any answer to it, nor any one who could even attempt to show that the first act of the first created atom did not strike the key-note of eternity.

At another time, speaking of the idea that God works through man, he burst out: 

“Yes, of course, just about as much as a man works through his microbes!”