It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook.  But he was baffled by lack of preparation.  He attempted to read books that required years of preliminary specialization.  One day he would read a book of antiquated philosophy, and the next day one that was ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the conflict and contradiction of ideas.  It was the same with the economists.  On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were obsolete.  He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to know.  He had become interested, in a day, in economics, industry, and politics.  Passing through the City Hall Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of which were half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly carrying on a discussion.  He joined the listeners, and heard a new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the people.  One was a tramp, another was a labor agitator, a third was a law-school student, and the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen.  For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single tax, and learned that there were warring social philosophies.  He heard hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging to fields of thought that his meagre reading had never touched upon.  Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions.  Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that what is is right, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and the father-atom and the mother-atom.

Martin Eden’s head was in a state of addlement when he went away after several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the definitions of a dozen unusual words.  And when he left the library, he carried under his arm four volumes:  Madam Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine,” “Progress and Poverty,” “The Quintessence of Socialism,” and, “Warfare of Religion and Science.”  Unfortunately, he began on the “Secret Doctrine.”  Every line bristled with many-syllabled words he did not understand.  He sat up in bed, and the dictionary was in front of him more often than the book.  He looked up so many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten their meaning and had to look them up again.  He devised the plan of writing the definitions in a note-book, and filled page after page with them.  And still he could not understand.  He read until three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but not one essential thought in the text had he grasped.  He looked up, and it seemed that the room was lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship upon the sea.  Then he