14, Waverley Place, September 23, 1860.

My dear Kingsley,

I cannot sufficiently thank you, both on my wife’s account and my own, for your long and frank letter, and for all the hearty sympathy which it exhibits—­and Mrs. Kingsley will, I hope, believe that we are no less sensible of her kind thought of us.  To myself your letter was especially valuable, as it touched upon what I thought even more than upon what I said in my letter to you.  My convictions, positive and negative, on all the matters of which you speak, are of long and slow growth and are firmly rooted.  But the great blow which fell upon me seemed to stir them to their foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and them—­and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind?  To which my only reply was and is—­Oh devil! truth is better than much profit.  I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.

And now I feel that it is due to you to speak as frankly as you have done to me.  An old and worthy friend of mine tried some three or four years ago to bring us together—­because, as he said, you were the only man who would do me any good.  Your letter leads me to think he was right, though not perhaps in the sense he attached to his own words.

To begin with the great doctrine you discuss.  I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man.  I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.

Pray understand that I have no a priori objections to the doctrine.  No man who has to deal daily and hourly with nature can trouble himself about a priori difficulties.  Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing anything else, and I will believe that.  Why should I not?  It is not half so wonderful as the conservation of force, or the indestructibility of matter.  Whoso clearly appreciates all that is implied in the falling of a stone can have no difficulty about any doctrine simply on account of its marvellousness.  But the longer I live, the more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a man’s life is to say and to feel, “I believe such and such to be true.”  All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest penalties of existence cling about that act.  The universe is one and the same throughout; and if the condition of my success in unravelling some little difficulty of anatomy or physiology is that I shall rigorously refuse to put faith in that which does not rest on sufficient evidence, I cannot believe that the great mysteries of existence will be laid open to me on other terms.  It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities.  I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my life and my hopes upon weaker convictions.  I dare not if I would.