ATTITUDE TOWARDS VICE 209 



This was probably because my attitude towards vice was not 

 based upon religious scruples, but was due to a primitive sense 

 of cleanliness, a vivid dislike to certain things because they stank. 

 I had the advantage of my mates, in that debauchery was not 

 novel to me, as it was to nearly all of them. In the rude, uncon- 

 cealed life where I was brought up, filth had always been visible, 

 so it had no mysterious charm. Moreover, the philosophical 

 way of looking at things which I had developed while with 

 Escher had, by the help of inheritance, given me a certain 

 antiquity of soul at its foundation, so that I looked upon the 

 doings of men with an amused interest which kept me then as 

 ever since much in the attitude of the spectator. So it fell to 

 me, who was the youngest of the lot, to be, as I was often called, 

 the old man; to help the roisterers out of their messes, and to 

 see them through the stage of soda-water and repentance. 



It is hardly too much to say that at three months over one 

 and twenty I was older in spirit than I am now. In fact, I look 

 back on myself with a certain perplexity in my efforts to account 

 for this curious state. The condition was probably due to the 

 fact that I had been a rather solitary child, had suffered much 

 from illness which too early forced introspection, had lacked 

 the good effects of public schooling, and had been too soon 

 inducted into philosophic ways. That I was not made a prig 

 was due to my keen interest in people, which led me to lose the 

 over-consciousness of self which is the necessary basis of that 

 detestable product of super-civilization. 



In my training up to my majority there was very much lack- 

 ing, but I had the good fortune to come under the influence of 

 several strong men, who in some measure imbued me with their 

 personalities and on whom directly or by reaction I was to some 

 extent shaped. My grandfather and my father in my childhood 

 in diverse ways opened the outer world to me; so, too, did the 

 unhappy Marshall. Probably no drunken genius ever did so 

 much to enlarge a lad as he. Escher had shown me the philoso- 

 pher in many ways at his best and his worst; but of all Agassiz 



