very little of the genuine naturalist in me.  I never collected anything, and species work was always a burden to me; what I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business, the working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse ends.

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.