one or the other.  Then they recede into the background.  As for their thought, we cannot for ever remain disciples.  We begin to see how much that looks like thought is really the expression of temperament, and how individual a thing temperament is, how each of us must construct his world for himself, or be content to wait for an answer and a synthesis “in that far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”  So, for one, in these high matters, I must be content as a “masterless man” swearing by no philosopher, unless he be the imperial Stoic of the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

Perhaps nothing in education encourages this incredulity about “masters” of thought like the history of philosophy.  The professor of moral philosophy, Mr. Ferrier, was a famous metaphysician and scholar.  His lectures on “The History of Greek Philosophy” were an admirable introduction to the subject, afterwards pursued, in the original authorities, at Oxford.  Mr. Ferrier was an exponent of other men’s ideas so fair and persuasive that, in each new school, we thought we had discovered the secret.  We were physicists with Thales and that pre-Socratic “company of gallant gentlemen” for whom Sydney Smith confessed his lack of admiration.  We were now Empedocleans, now believers in Heraclitus, now in Socrates, now in Plato, now in Aristotle.  In each lecture our professor set up a new master and gently disintegrated him in the next.  “Amurath to Amurath succeeds,” as Mr. T. H. Green used to say at Oxford.  He himself became an Amurath, a sultan of thought, even before his apotheosis as the guide of that bewildered clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere.  At Oxford, when one went there, one found Mr. Green already in the position of a leader of thought, and of young men.  He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, “He knows! he knows!” What was it that Mr. Green knew?  Where was the secret?  To a mind already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from the tutor’s noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack of translating St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which we then believed to be Hegelian.  Hegel we knew, not in the original German, but in lectures and in translations.  Reasoning from these inadequate premises, it seemed to me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr. Darwin, that his system showed, so to speak, the spirit at work in evolution, the something within the wheels.  But this was only a personal impression made on a mind which knew Darwin, and physical speculations in general, merely in the vague popular way.  Mr. Green’s pupils could generally write in his own language, more or less, and could “envisage” things, as we said then, from his point of view.  To do this was believed, probably without cause, to be useful in examinations.  For one, I could never take it much more seriously, never believed that “the