The Friend of Man was totally deaf and blind and insensible to men. Man, as a metaphysical concept, was the major premiss of his philosophy; men, as individuals, he was totally unable to realise. He could not see you, he could not hear you, he could get no “realising sense” of you. You spoke, but your voice was an unintelligible murmur in his ears; it was like the sound of the wind—it might annoy him, disturb him (in which case he would seek to silence it with a hist-hist), it could not signify to him. You stood up, in front of him; but you were invisible to him; he saw beyond you. And even when he spoke, he did not speak to you, he spoke to the walls and ceiling—he thought aloud. He took no account of his auditor’s capacities, of the subject that would interest him, of the language he would understand. You asked him to tell you about Mazzini, and he discoursed of Albigo and the Unification of Mankind. And then, when he ceased to speak, directly he fell silent and somebody else took the word, the gates of his mind were shut; he withdrew behind them, returned to his private meditations, and so remained, detached, solitary, preoccupied, till the time came when he was moved to speak again. He was the Friend of Man, but men did not exist for him. He was like a mathematician busied with a calculation, eager for the sum-total, but heedless of the separate integers. My father—my mother—I—whosoever approached him—was a phantasm: a convenient phantasm, possibly, with a house where he might be lodged and fed, with a purse whence might be supplied the funds requisite for the publication of his works; or possibly a troublesome phantasm, that worried him by shouting at its play: but a phantasm, none the less. Years ago, my downright Aunt Elizabeth had disposed of him with two words: a charlatan, an impostor. My Aunt Elizabeth was utterly mistaken. Mr. Ambrose’s sincerity was absolute. The one thing he professed belief in, he believed in with an intensity that rendered him unconscious of all things else; his one conviction was so predominant as to exclude all other convictions. What was the one thing he believed in, the one thing he was convinced of? It would be easy to reply, himself; to declare that, at least, when she had called him an egotist, my Aunt Elizabeth had been right. It would be easy, but I am sure it would be untrue. The thing he believed in, the thing he was convinced of, the only thing in this whole universe which he saw, was his vision. That, I am persuaded, is the explanation of the man. It explains him in big and in little. It explains his career, his fortunes, his failure, his table-manners, his testiness, and the queerest of his actions.