236 AGNOSTICISM VII 



the Unconditioned/' which I came upon, by 

 chance, in an odd volume of the " Edinburgh 

 Review/' The latter was certainly strange reading 

 for a boy, and I could not possibly have under- 

 stood a great deal of it ; l nevertheless, I devoured 

 it with avidity, and it stamped upon my mind the 

 strong conviction that, on even the most solemn 

 and important of questions, men are apt to take 

 cunning phrases for answers ; and that the limita- 

 tion of our faculties, in a great number of cases, 

 renders real answers to such questions, not merely 

 actually impossible, but theoretically inconceiv- 

 able. 



Philosophy and history having laid hold of me 

 in this eccentric fashion, have never loosened their 

 grip. I have no pretension to be an expert in 

 either subject ; but the turn for philosophical and 

 historical reading, which rendered Hamilton and 

 Guizot attractive to me, has not only filled many 

 lawful leisure hours, and still more sleepless ones, 

 with the repose of changed mental occupation, but 

 has not unfrequently disputed my proper work -time 

 with my liege lady, N atural Science. In this way 

 I have found it possible to cover a good deal of 

 ground in the territory of philosophy ; and all the 

 more easily that I have never cared much about A's 



1 Yet I must somehow have laid hold of the pith of the 

 matter, for, many years afterwards, when Dean Hansel's 

 Bampton Lectures were published, it seemed to me I already 

 knew all that this eminently agnostic thinker had to tell me. 



