a of the whole process of self-education on which I
was from this time forward embarked.' In other words, if he could have
interpreted and classified his own intellectual type, he would have
known that it was the Reflective. Reflection is a faculty that ripens
slowly; the prelude of its maturity is often a dull and apparently
numb-witted youth. Though Pattison conceived his ideal at the age of
twenty, he was five-and-forty before he finally and deliberately
embraced it and shaped his life in conformity to it. The principle of
rationalism, instead of growing, seemed for twelve whole years to go
under, and to be completely mastered by the antagonistic principles of
authority, tradition, and transcendental faith.

The secret is to be found in what is the key to Pattison's whole
existence, and of what he was more conscious at first than he seems to
have been in later days. He was affected from first to last by a
profound weakness of will and character. Few men of eminence have ever
lived so destitute of nerve as Pattison was--of nerve for the ordinary
demands of life, and of nerve for those large enterprises in literature
for which by talent and attainment he was so admirably qualified. The
stamp of moral _defaillance_ was set upon his brow from the beginning.
It was something deeper in its roots than the temporary
self-consciousness of the adolescent that afflicted him in his early
days at Oxford. The shy and stiff undergraduate is a familiar type
enough, and Pattison is not the only youth of twenty of whom such an
account as his own is true:--

This inability to apprehend the reason of my social ill success had
a discouraging consequence upon the growth of my character. I was
so convinced that the fault was in me, and not in the others, that
I lost anything like firm footing, and succumbed to or imitated any
type, or set, with which I was brought in contact, esteeming it
better than my own, of which I was too ashamed to stand by it and
assert it. Any rough, rude, self-confident fellow, who spoke out
what he thought and felt, cowed me, and I yielded to him, and even
assented to him, not with that yielding which gives way for peace's
sate, secretly thinking itself right, but with a surrender of the
convictions to his mode of thinking, as being better than my own,
more like men, more like the world (p. 48).

This fatal trait remained unalterable to the very end, b