226 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



leisure on the various matters that interested me. Thus was 

 induced a receptiveness of mind which enabled me at different 

 times to utilize what appeared to me as sudden intuitions — 

 flashes of light leading to a solution of some problem which 

 was then before me ; and these flashes would often come to 

 me when, pen in hand, I was engaged in writing on a subject 

 on which I had no intention or expectation of saying anything 

 new. 



There is one other point in which most of my scientific 

 friends and readers will hold that I am deficient, but which 

 in a popular writer on science may be considered to be an 

 advantage. It is, that though fond of order and systematic 

 arrangement of all the parts of a subject, and especially of an 

 argument, I am yet, through my want of the language- 

 faculty, very much disinclined to use technical terms wherever 

 they can be avoided. This is especially the case when a 

 subject is elaborately divided up under various subordinate 

 groups and sub-groups, each with a quite new technical name. 

 This often seems to me more confusing than enlightening, and 

 when other writers introduce different terms of their own, or 

 use them in a somewhat different sense, or still further sub- 

 divide the groups, the complication becomes too great for the 

 non-specialist to follow. 



Before leaving the sketch of my mental nature at the 

 threshold of my uncontrolled life, I may properly say a few 

 words on the position I had arrived at in regard to the great 

 question of religious belief. I have already shown that my 

 early home training was in a thoroughly religious but by no 

 means rigid family, where, however, no religious doubts were 

 ever expressed, and where the word " atheist " was used with 

 bated breath as pertaining to a being too debased almost for 

 human society. The only regular teaching I received was to 

 say or hear a formal prayer before going to bed, hearing 

 grace before and after dinner, and learning a collect every 

 Sunday morning, the latter certainly one of the most stupid 

 ways of inculcating religion ever conceived. On Sunday 

 evenings, if we did not go to church or chapel, my father 



