YOUTHFUL LOVE OF PHILOSOPHY 63 



The Mercantile Library in Cincinnati had many such books 

 which I devoured. I recall the pleasure with which I bought a 

 set of G. H. Lewes's "History of Philosophy," a rather poor 

 book as I now see it, but then a treasure in my eyes. I had two 

 German manuals, the titles of which I have forgotten. The 

 curious thing about this prolonged excursion is that I really got 

 something out of it. I appear even to have gained an adequate 

 idea of Kant's "Critique," though I doubt if I could compass it 

 to-day without much labor. With all this intense interest in the 

 speculations of men and the history of the evolutions of their 

 systems, I had no real belief in the essential verity of them. 

 They charmed me as an exercise of wits much as did chess, to 

 which at this time and at various later periods I became ad- 

 dicted. The sense of the difference between speculative and 

 experimental inquiry was so far in my nature that when at 

 about nineteen years of age I came in contact with the work of 

 Auguste Comte, my interest in philosophic systems rapidly 

 declined, to be roused in a limited way in after life, and then 

 only as the means of rationalizing the evidence afforded by the 

 phenomenal world. 



While my youthful love of philosophy, though for two or 

 three years very great, bore no immediate fruit, the ground on 

 which the seeding fell was essentially strong, and it had certain 

 secondary effects which have been of permanent value to me. 

 No youth can be filled with that vast concatenation of semi- 

 logical deductions from an impossible postulate which makes 

 up the system of Hegel, and in the end purge himself of it all, 

 without very enlarging experiences. If he goes further, and 

 sympathetically takes in the speculations of the Greek and 

 German philosophers, and works himself through the main 

 notions of the English and Scotch schools, even if at the end he 

 casts it all away, he has a thought background for all his life. 

 If one can be in the society of these futile giants and in the end 

 escape from them, it is well for him. Intellectually there are, in 

 my opinion, few things worse than to be cramped and kept in 



