all the more easily that I have never cared much about A’s or B’s opinions, but have rather sought to know what answer he had to give to the questions I had to put to him—­that of the limitation of possible knowledge the chief.  The ordinary examiner, his “State the views of So-and-so,” would have floored me at any time.  If he had said what do you think about any given problem, I might have got on fairly well.

The reader who has had the patience to follow the enforced, but unwilling, egotism of this veritable history (especially if his studies have led him in the same direction), will now see why my mind steadily gravitated towards the conclusions of Hume and Kant, so well stated by the latter in a sentence, which I have quoted elsewhere.

“The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason is, after all, merely negative, since it serves not as an organon for the enlargement [of knowledge], but as a discipline for its delimitation; and, instead of discovering truth, has only the modest merit of preventing error.” [38]

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last.  The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them.  They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis,”—­had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.  And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion.  Like Dante,

    Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
      Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

but, unlike Dante, I cannot add,

    Che la diritta via era smarrita.

On the contrary, I had, and have, the firmest conviction that I never left the “verace via”—­the straight road; and that this road led nowhere else but into the dark depths of a wild and tangled forest.  And though I have found leopards and lions in the path; though I have made abundant acquaintance with the hungry wolf, that “with privy paw devours apace and nothing said,” as another great poet says of the ravening beast; and though no friendly spectre has even yet offered his guidance, I was, and am, minded to go straight on, until I either come out on the other side of the wood, or find there is no other side to it, at least, none attainable by me.