en thought (and accepted as
unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed,
kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and
could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I
not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find
no other."

'What is Man?' propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue
between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that "Beliefs are
acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change;
nothing whatever can change temperament." He enunciates the theory,
which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such
person as a permanent seeker after truth.

"When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth,
with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he
tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors." "All training," he
avers, "is one form or another of outside influences, and association is
the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside
influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him
upward--but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time."
Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another
story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of
writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to
high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling
protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer
was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is
Man?': "Oh, he is real. He's all the boy that I have known or
recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because,
when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education
avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man.
Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and
gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He
would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an
angel." It was what he called Kismet.

It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the
days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all
faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or
theology, atheism or agnosti