God, as Descartes justly said, we know! but what is man? The schools answered:— Man is a rational animal! So was apparently a dog, or a bee, or a bea… - Henry Brooks Adams

That Swinburne was altogether new to the three types of men-of-the-world before him; that he seemed to them quite original, wildly eccentric, astonishingly gifted, and convulsingly droll, Adams could see; but what more he was, even Milnes hardly dared say. They could not believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, mediaeval, and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante, or Villon, or Victor Hugo.

This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long — the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more serious still.

With very slight straining of equivalents, Thomas might now be written thus:— By the term God, is meant a Prime Mover which supplies all energy to the universe, and acts directly on man as well as on all other creatures, moving him as a mechanical motor might do; but man, being specially provided with an organism more complex than the organisms of other creatures, enjoys an exceptional capacity for reflex action,— a power of reflexion,— which enables him within certain limits to choose between paths; and this singular capacity is called free choice or free-will. Of course, the reflexion is not choice, and though a man's mind reflected as perfectly as the facets of a lighthouse lantern, it would never reach a choice without an energy which impels it to act. [...] The scheme seems to differ little, and unwillingly, from a system of dynamics as modern as the dynamo.