64 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



any kind of logical prison, but they are capital places for exer- 

 cising the wits. 



One effect of the study of philosophy was that I became very 

 much interested in the history of Greece. I read several works 

 on the subject and bought a set of Grote's great twelve- volume 

 book and studied it with much care when about seventeen years 

 of age. Long afterwards I found an abstract of these volumes 

 which I had made. It was laboriously done, and with a measure 

 of intelligence which gave me a certain respect for the vanished 

 lad which I had not previously entertained. 

 ''As I look back on the stages of my life up to my eighteenth 

 year, I have the curious impression that it was not a continuous 

 existence, with a progressive intercalation of characteristics, 

 but a number of disjointed personalities tagged with a common 

 name. The child up to about ten years of age was not the father 

 of the lad of twelve; nor was that rather ill-conditioned urchin 

 gradually transformed at fifteen into the beginnings of a specu- 

 lative philosopher. These individualities inhabited one unfolded 

 body, but while there were links connecting them, they seem to 

 have been curiously unrelated. This impression is doubtless 

 partly due to the lack in this formative period of a continuous 

 thread, such as is afforded by the usual uninterrupted process 

 of schooling. I was left free to move with the natural currents 

 of my inner life, so that heredity and what may be termed 

 natural environment had free play. For long I thought that this 

 lack of systematic training in my youth, though in some meas- 

 ure due to my frail health, was a wrong done me. As I have 

 grown older, and seen some of the effects of our schooling in 

 stunting the development of youths, I have come to the conclu- 

 sion that in my case it was a piece of good fortune that I was 

 thus left mainly to my native impulses. It cost me rather dear 

 on some sides of my education, especially in the field of mathe- 

 matics. Had I been properly ushered into that science in place 

 of being left to my own devices, I should have gone forward to 

 a fair measure of command of it as an instrument of inquiry, 



