osopher touched a kindred note in Philip; and, revelling in
the lucid style which seemed able to put complicated thought into simple
words, musical and measured, he read as he might have read a novel, a
smile of pleasure on his lips. But in none could he find exactly what he
wanted. He had read somewhere that every man was born a Platonist, an
Aristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history of George Henry
Lewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all moonshine) was there to
show that the thought of each philosopher was inseparably connected with
the man he was. When you knew that you could guess to a great extent the
philosophy he wrote. It looked as though you did not act in a certain way
because you thought in a certain way, but rather that you thought in a
certain way because you were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to
do with it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own
philosopher, and the elaborate systems which the great men of the past had
composed were only valid for the writers.

The thing then was to discover what one was and one's system of philosophy
would devise itself. It seemed to Philip that there were three things to
find out: man's relation to the world he lives in, man's relation with the
men among whom he lives, and finally man's relation to himself. He made an
elaborate plan of study.

The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact with the manners
and customs of the people among whom you live, you observe them from the
outside and see that they have not the necessity which those who practise
them believe. You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you
are self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. The year in Germany, the
long stay in Paris, had prepared Philip to receive the sceptical teaching
which came to him now with such a feeling of relief. He saw that nothing
was good and nothing was evil; things were merely adapted to an end. He
read The Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an explanation of much
that troubled him. He was like an explorer now who has reasoned that
certain natural features must present themselves, and, beating up a broad
river, finds here the tributary that he expected, there the fertile,
populated plains, and further on the mountains. When some great discovery
is made the world is surprised afterwards that it was not accepted at
once, and even on those who acknowledge its truth the effect is
unimportant. The first