viii Introduction 



the wretched little school that he attended, and in after 

 years used to say that " he had two years of a Pandemo- 

 nium of a school (between eight and ten) and after that 

 neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till 

 he reached manhood." 



He was always fond of reading and used to browse at 

 random in his father's library. " When a boy of twelve," 

 his son and biographer writes, " he used to light his candle 

 before dawn, pin a blanket around his shoulders, and sit 

 up in bed to read Hutton's Geology." His tastes were 

 scientific but he did not confine his reading to science. He 

 was still a child when he read Sir William Hamilton's 

 Philosophy of the Unconditioned, but his comment on it is 

 not that of a child: "It stamped on my mind the strong 

 conviction that on even the most solemn and important 

 of questions, men are apt to take cunning phrases for an- 

 swers." 



But Carlyle had the most lasting influence upon him 

 during these formative years. It was interest in Carlyle 

 that led him to study German, just as at the age of fifty- 

 three he learned Greek so that he might read Aristotle in 

 the original. During these years he also taught himself 

 French and Italian. Of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus he 

 wrote : " It led me to know that a deep sense of religion 

 was compatible with the entire absence of theology." 

 Carlyle taught him also a hatred of shams and a love of 

 uncompromising truthfulness that remained a passion with 

 him as long as he lived. " If wife and child," he said, 

 " and name and fame were all lost to me, one after an- 

 other, still I would not lie. . . . The longer I live, the 

 more obvious it is to me that the most sacred act of a 

 man's life is to say and to feel, ' I believe such and such to 

 be true.' All the greatest rewards and all the heaviest 

 penalties of existence cling about that act." 



