were days when the
sight of a book filled me with physical nausea, with contempt for the
littleness, the narrow outlook, that seemed to me to characterise every
written work. I was fiercely, but quite impotently, eager at such times
to demonstrate the futility of all the philosophy ranged on the rough
wooden shelves in my gloomy sitting-room. I would walk up and down and
gesticulate, struggling, fighting to make clear to myself what a true
philosophy should set forth. I felt at such times that all the knowledge
I needed for so stupendous a task was present with me in some
inexplicable way, was even pressing upon me, but that my brain was so
clogged and heavy that not one idea of all that priceless wisdom could
be expressed in clear thought. "I have never been taught to think," I
would complain, "I have never perfected the machinery of thought," and
then some dictum thrown out haphazard by the Wonder--his conception of
light conversation--would recur to me, and I would realise that however
well I had been trained, my limitations would remain, that I was an
undeveloped animal, only one stage higher than a totem-fearing savage, a
creature of small possibilities, incapable of dealing with great
problems.

Once the Wonder said to me, in a rare moment of lucid condescension to
my feeble intellect, "You figure space as a void in three dimensions,
and time as a line that runs across it, and all other conceptions you
relegate to that measure." He implied that this was a cumbrous machinery
which had no relation to reality, and could define nothing. He told me
that his idea of force, for example, was a pure abstraction, for which
there was no figure in my mental outfit.

Such pronouncements as these left me struggling like a drowning man in
deep water. I felt that it _must_ be possible for me to come to the
surface, but I could do nothing but flounder; beating fiercely with
limbs that were so powerful and yet so utterly useless. I saw that my
very metaphors symbolised my feebleness; I had no terms for my own
mental condition; I was forced to resort to some inapplicable physical
analogy.

These fits of revolt against the limitations of human thought grew more
frequent as the summer progressed. Day after day my self-sufficiency and
conceit were being crushed out of me. I was always in the society of a
boy of seven whom I was forced to regard as immeasurably my intellectual
superior. There was no department of useful knowledge in