In Goethe, so glorious otherwise, I chiefly noticed the self-inflicted hurts of genius, as it broke itself in vain against the philosophy of Newton. For a time Mr. Bain became my principal companion. I found him learned and practical, shining generally with a dry light, but exhibiting at times a flush of emotional strength, which proved that even logicians share the common fire of humanity. He interested me most when he became the mirror of my own condition. Neither intellectually nor socially is it good for man to be alone, and the griefs of thought are more patiently borne when we find that they have been experienced by another. From certain passages in his book I could infer that Mr. Bain was no stranger to such sorrows. Take this passage as an illustration. Speaking of the ebb of intellectual force which we all from time to time experience, Mr. Bain says: “The uncertainty where to look for the next opening of discovery brings the pain of conflict and the debility of indecision.” These words have in them the true ring of personal experience. The action of the investigator is periodic. He grapples with a subject of inquiry, wrestles with it, overcomes it, exhausts, it may be, both himself and it for the time being. He breathes a space, and then renews the struggle in another field. Now this period of halting between two investigations is not always one of pure repose. It is often a period of doubt and discomfort, of gloom and ennui. “The uncertainty where to look for the next opening of discovery brings the pain of conflict and the debility of indecision.” Such was my precise condition in the Alps this year; in a score of words Mr. Bain has here sketched my mental diagnosis; and it was under these evil circumstances that I had to equip myself for the hour and the ordeal that are now come. Gladly, however, as I should have seen this duty in other hands, I could by no means shrink from it. Disloyalty would have been worse than failure. In some fashion or other—feebly or strongly, meanly or manfully, on the higher levels of thought, or on the flats of commonplace—the task had to be accomplished. I looked in various directions for help and furtherance; but without me for a time I saw only “antres vast,” and within me “deserts idle.” My case resembled that of a sick doctor who had forgotten his art, and sorely needed the prescription of a friend. Mr. Bain wrote one for me. He said: “Your present knowledge must forge the links of connection between what has been already achieved and what is now required.”