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aptitude and strange ambitions.
    Through diligent study, Victor has learned the secrets of life. As in Byron’s and Shelley’s conversation, his impulse is to gather the component parts of a creature and endue them with vital warmth. He collects bones from the charnel house and animates them.
    We hardly see how the trick is performed. There is none of the “powerful engine” that Mary, in 1831, reported herself as having seen in her dream. The crucial scene that Mary wrote on the morning after her inspiration, the scene of the animation of the monster that begins Chapter 5, is very spare:

    It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. 22

    This is all we get of the mechanics. As in her dream, Mary’s protagonist is immediately horrified at what he has done and runs away. He will tell us no more:

    I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be; listen patiently until the end of my story, and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. 23

    Here in Frankenstein is evidence that exact detail, however useful to plausibility, is not itself necessary for plausibility to be achieved. The plausibility—the potential possibility—of the transcendent science that animates Victor Frankenstein’s creature is established through a dramatic argument. We are prepared for the monster’s animation by this argument, which is presented in the form of the story of Victor Frankenstein’s education.
    Mary Shelley’s argument for new plausible transcendence is designed to encapsulate the experience of the early Nineteenth Century, still tied to the past, but a witness to change: At the age of thirteen, Victor Frankenstein stumbles across the alchemical works of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, the representatives of the old spiritual science, and is struck by their mystery and power. Stimulated by these marvels, he seeks to find the elixir of life and attempts to raise ghosts and devils. But he fails. Victor is a modern, and this ancient spirit-based science will not work for him.
    Then Victor becomes acquainted with more contemporary science. Its overwhelming power of doubt ends his attempts to operate the old transcendent science. But it also makes him bitter:

    I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the inquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth. 24

    However, when Victor goes off to the university, his outlook on science is changed. A lecturer in chemistry speaks to his class about ancient science and modern science—and lays the groundwork of plausibility for the marvel of transcendent science that will ensue:

    “The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of