'We must not think too deeply'--because it is not pleasant. 'I most willingly admit,' he says elsewhere, 'that of all kinds of misery, the misery of thought is the severest.' He wished to escape from thought, and found his religion a very pleasant substitute. It enabled him to believe all that he found most pleasant in beliefs, and to reject what he found disquieting. The fear of death, he discovered, could best be alleviated by believing in the divine revelation; accordingly he proceeded to adopt this belief. But the pleasure which Boswell obtained in this way was not merely the pleasure of a mind lulled to tranquillity, it was the pleasure also of possessing a point of view. He wanted to be entirely respectable. And respectability was to be achieved by adopting wholesale the respectable beliefs. Boswell perhaps could never have been otherwise than conventional in his ethical and religious thought; but he did at one time think, and he deliberately ceased to think; with the consequence that all those views which he might or might not have arrived at by thought and experience, instead of being deeply founded within him, were only an ill-balanced superstructure. * * * * * The effect of Johnson upon this development was a very remarkable one. Johnson himself was pre-eminently a conformist, and it was partly, no doubt, from his example that Boswell derived his desire to be respectable--to be, as he expressed it, 'an uniform pretty man.' Boswell's own words show us that he was influenced in this way. A meeting had been arranged between Johnson and one of Boswell's friends, George Dempster, who held the sceptical views of Hume and Rousseau; a discussion took place in which Johnson, whether by force of argument or power of lungs, was victorious. 'I had infinite satisfaction,' says Boswell, 'in hearing solid truth confuting vain subtilty. I thank God that I have got acquainted with Mr. Johnson. He has done me infinite service. He has assisted me to obtain peace of mind, he has assisted me to become a rational Christian.' How much are we to assume from this? How much of Boswell's respectability came directly from Johnson? There could be nothing more unreasonable than to dogmatise about the extent of a personal influence. How subtle and intricate it is in the thousand chances of a mind's development, of acquiescence and rebellion, of mere time and place! how difficult to see the beginning and the end, to know even approximately the value of any one force in a number of causes! The distinction alone between a conscious or unconscious acceptance, what a difference it makes!