224 MY LIFE 



to know the causes of things, a great love of beauty m form 

 and colour, and a considerable but not excessive desire for 

 order and arrangement in whatever I had to do. If I had 

 one distinct mental faculty more prominent than another, it 

 was the power of correct reasoning from a review of the 

 known facts in any case to the causes or laws which produced 

 them, and also in detecting fallacies in the reasoning of other 

 persons. This power has greatly helped me in all my writ- 

 ings, especially those on natural history and sociology. The 

 determination of the direction in which I should use these 

 powers was due to my possession in a high degree of the two 

 mental qualities usually termed emotional or moral, an intense 

 appreciation of the beauty, harmony, and variety in nature and 

 in all natural phenomena, and an equally strong passion for 

 justice as between man and man — an abhorrence of all 

 tyranny, all compulsion, all unnecessary interference with the 

 liberty of others. These characteristics, combined with cer- 

 tain favourable conditions, some of which have already been 

 referred to, have determined the direction of the pursuits and 

 inquiries in which I have spent a large portion of my life. 



It will be well to state here certain marked deficiencies in 

 my mental equipment which have also had a share in deter- 

 mining the direction of my special activities. My greatest, 

 though not perhaps most important, defect is my inability to 

 perceive the niceties of melody and harmony in music; in 

 common language, I have no ear for music. But as I have 

 a fair appreciation of time, expression, and general effect, I 

 am deeply affected by grand, pathetic, or religious music, and 

 can at once tell when the heart and soul of the musician is in 

 his performance, though any number of technical errors, 

 false notes, or disharmonies would pass unnoticed. Another 

 and more serious defect is in verbal memory, which, combined 

 with the inability to reproduce vocal sounds, has rendered 

 the acquirement of all foreign languages very difficult and 

 distasteful. This, with my very imperfect school training, 

 added to my shyness and want of confidence, must have 

 caused me to appear a very dull, ignorant, and uneducated 

 person to numbers of chance acquaintances. This deficiency 



