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Page 5
One or two typical extracts may be given from the _Journal_, which
opens with a quotation from Novalis: "Philosophy can bake no bread;
but it can prove for us God, freedom, and immortality. Which, now, is
more practical, Philosophy or Economy?" Later comes a quotation from
Lessing, which involved a cardinal principle that he claimed for
himself, and demanded of his pupils: accept no authority without
verifying it for yourself:--
I hate all people who want to found sects. It is not error,
but sects--it is not error, but sectarian error, nay, and even
sectarian truth, which causes the unhappiness of mankind.
Electricity interests him specially; among other experiments,
while theorizing upon them, he makes a galvanic battery "in view
of experiment to get crystallized carbon: got it deposited, but not
crystallized."
He is a young Radical in his opposition to anything like injustice,
though frankly admitting that youth is not infallible. One of his
boyish speculations was as to what would become of things if their
qualities were taken away. While on this quest, he got hold of Sir
William Hamilton's _Logic_, and read it to such good effect that when,
years afterwards, he sat down to the greater philosophers, he found
that he already had a clear notion of where the key of metaphysics
lay. The following extract from the _Journal_ shows that he already
had a characteristic point of view:--
Had a long talk with my mother and father about the right to
make Dissenters pay church rates, and whether there ought to
be any Establishment. I maintain that there ought not in both
cases--I wonder what will be my opinion ten years hence? I
think now that it is against all laws of justice to force
men to support a church with whose opinions they cannot
conscientiously agree. The argument that the rate is so small
is very fallacious. It is as much a sacrifice of principle to
do a little wrong as to do a great one.
His friend, George Anderson May, with whom the boy of fifteen has "a
long argument on the nature of the soul and the difference between
it and matter," was then a man of six and twenty, in business at
Hinckley.
I maintained that it could not be proved that matter is
_essentially_, as to its base, different from soul. Mr. M.
wittily said soul was the perspiration of matter.
We cannot find the absolute basis of matter; we only know it
by its properties; neither know we the soul in any other way.
_Cogito ergo sum_ is the only thing that we _certainly_ know.
Why may not soul and matter be of the same substance (i.e.,
basis whereon to fix qualities; for we cannot suppose a
quality to exist _per se_, it must have a something to
qualify), but with different qualities?
Hamilton's analysis of the Absolute, once learned, was never
forgotten. It was a philosophic touchstone, understood by the
boy, applied by the man. With the Absolute, an entity stripped of
perceptible qualities, an "hypostatized negation," he could have no
traffic. The Cartesian motto of thought as the essence of existence
became another fixed point for him, and his last questioning phrase
half suggests the line of reasoning which, as he afterwards put
it, asserts that, philosophically speaking, materialism is but
spiritualism turned inside out.
III
MEDICAL TRAINING
At fifteen and a-half he began his medical training. Engineering, it
seems, was not within his parents' purview; the boy was thoughtful
and scientific; medicine was then the only avenue for science, and
medicine loomed large on their horizon, for two of their daughters
had married doctors. Of these, Dr. Cooke had already begun to give him
instruction in anatomy; it looked as though destiny had marked out his
career.
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