The note-book opens with “Hints Towards the Investigation of Truth in Religious and Political Opinions, composed as they occurred, to be placed in a more regular manner hereafter.” Then follow essays “On the Immortality and Immateriality of the Soul”; “Body, Organised Matter”; on “Governments”; on “The Credulity of Mortals”; “An Essay to Prove that the Thinking Powers depend on the Organisation of the Body”; “A Defence of Materialism”; “An Essay on the Ultimate End of Being”; “On Happiness”; “On Moral Obligation.” These early essays display the workings of an original mind, intent, it may be, on problems beyond its immature powers, but striving in all sincerity to work out its own thoughts and to arrive at its own conclusions. Of course, the daring youth of sixteen who enters upon an inquiry into the most difficult problems of theology and metaphysics, with, what he is pleased to call, unprejudiced reason as his sole guide, quickly passes into a cold fit of materialism. His mind was too impressionable, however, to have reached the stage of settled convictions; and in the same note-book we subsequently find the heads of a train of argument in favour of a rational religious belief founded on immaterialism. Metaphysical inquiries seem, indeed, to have occupied the greater part of his time at this period; and his note-books show that he made himself acquainted with the writings of Locke, Hartley, Bishop Berkeley, Hume, Helvetius, Condorcet, and Reid, and that he had some knowledge of the doctrines of Kant and the Transcendentalists. That he thought for himself, and was not unduly swayed by authority, is evident from the general tenour of his notes, and from the critical remarks and comments by which they are accompanied. Some of these are worth quoting:-- “Science or knowledge is the association of a number of ideas, with some idea or term capable of recalling them to the mind in a certain order.” “By examining the phenomena of Nature, a certain similarity of effects is discovered. The business of science is to discover these effects, and to refer them to some common cause; that is to generalise ideas.”