Rousseau Tetherby arrives at university from the frosty hills of Maine carrying more questions than answers. He finds himself immediately drawn into intellectual combat with Dr. Materialismus, a forbidding German professor who preaches that emotion is mere chemistry and the soul is just neurons firing in the dark. Their debates pit cold science against something warmer, something Tetherby can't name until he meets Althea Hardy. She represents everything the professor's philosophy cannot account for: the irrational pull of desire, the mystery of another consciousness, the terrifying vulnerability of loving someone whose mind you cannot reduce to matter. Stimson's 1893 novel captures a moment when Darwin had shaken the world and every thoughtful person had to decide what kind of creature they believed themselves to be. This is a book about the war inside one man's soul between the head and the heart, waged on the battlefield of late nineteenth-century American idealism.
