He at once decided on schoolmastering, and without much difficulty secured a post at an upper-class private school, being a substantial suburban house, in fine timbered grounds, the boys being all destined for public schools.

He wrote me several letters from that place, but during that time our correspondence waned, as we were both very busy.  He was interested in his work, and very popular with the boys.

“My experience of life generally gives me a strong impulse in favour of Determinism; that is to say, the system which considers the histories of nations, the lives of individuals, their very deeds and words, to be all part of a vast unalterable design:  and whose dealing with the past, with each event, indeed, as it occurs, is thus nothing but interpretation, an earnest endeavour to exclude regret or disappointment, and to see how best to link each fact in our past on with what we know of ourselves, to see its bearing on our individual case.  Of course this will operate with our view of the future too, but only in a general way, to minimize ambition and anxiety.  It produces, in fact, exactly the same effect as a perfect ‘faith;’ indeed, it is hard to distinguish the two, except that faith is the instinctive practice of the theory of Determinism.

“Now, the more I work at education, the more I am driven into Determinism; it seems that we can hardly regulate tendency, in fact as if the schoolmaster’s only duty was to register change.  A boy comes to a place like this, [Greek:  mnemonikos] and [Greek:  philomathes], and [Greek:  euphyes], as Ascham calls it, in other respects; he is not exposed, let us say, to any of the temptations which extraordinary charms of face or manner seem always to entail upon their possessors, and he leaves it just the same, except that the natural propensities are naturally developed; whereas a boy with precisely the same educational and social advantages but without a predisposition to profit by them leaves school hardly altered in person or mind.  It is true that circumstances alter character—­that can not be disputed; but circumstances are precisely what we can not touch.  A boy, [Greek:  euphyes] as I have described, brought up as a street-arab, would only so far profit by it as to be slightly less vicious and disgusting than his companions.  But education, which we speak of as a panacea for all ills, only deals with what it finds, and does not, as we ought to claim, rub down bad points and accentuate good, and it is this, that perhaps more than anything else has made me a Determinist, that the very capacity for change and improvement is so native to some characters, and so utterly lacking to others.  A man can in real truth do nothing of himself, though there are all possible varieties—­from the man who can see his deficiencies and make them up, through the man who sees his weak points and can not strengthen them, to the spiritually blind who can not even see them.  I may of course belong to the latter class myself—­it is the one thing about which no one can decide for himself—­but an inherent contempt for certain parts of my character seems to hint to me that it is not so.”