Of course, that is all very silly!  But I believe; only I want my unbelief helped!  If you can tell me what services are rendered by erudition to national life, you will relieve my doubts.  Do not merely say that it enlarges the bounds of knowledge, unless you are also prepared to prove that knowledge is, per se, a desirable thing.  I am not sure that it is not a hideous idol, a Mumbo Jumbo, a Moloch in whose honour children have still to pass through the fire in the recesses of dark academic groves.—­Ever yours,

T. B.

Upton,
Nov. 1, 1904.

My dear Herbert,—­I have read, after a fashion, in the course of the last month, the Autobiography of Herbert Spencer.  I know nothing of his philosophy—­I doubt if I have read half-a-dozen pages of his writings; and the man, as revealed in his own transparent confessions, is almost wholly destitute of attractiveness.  All the same it is an intensely interesting book, because it is the attempt of a profound egotist to give a perfectly sincere picture of his life.  Of course, I should have read it with greater appreciation if I had studied or cared for his books; but I take for granted that he was a great man, and accomplished a great work, and I like to see how he achieved it.

The book is the strongest argument I have ever yet read against a rational education.  I who despair of the public-school classical system, am reluctantly forced to confess that it can sow the seeds of fairer flowers than ever blossomed in the soul of Herbert Spencer.  He was by no means devoid of aesthetic perception.  He says that the sight of a mountain, and music heard in a cathedral were two of the things that moved him most.  He describes a particular sunset which he saw in Scotland, and describes the experience as the climax of his emotional sensations.  He was devoted to music, and had a somewhat contemptuous enjoyment of pictures.  But the arrogance and impenetrability of the man rise up on every page.  He cannot say frankly that he does not understand art and literature; he dogmatises about them, and gives the reader to understand that there is really nothing in them.  He criticises the classics from the standpoint of a fourth form boy.  He sits like a dry old spider, spinning his philosophical web, with a dozen avenues of the soul closed to him, and denying that such avenues exist.  As a statistical and sociological expert he ought to have taken into account the large number of people who are affected by what we may call the beautiful, and to have allowed for its existence even if he could not feel it.  But no, he is perfectly self-satisfied, perfectly decided.  And this is the more surprising because the man was in reality a hedonist.  He protests finely in more than one place against those who make life subsidiary to work.  He is quite clear on the point that work is only a part of life, and that to live is the object of man.  Again, he states