One object for which I have attempted to form an arrangement of knowledge is that I may test the amount of my own acquirements. I shall form an extensive list of subjects on this plan, and as I acquire any one of them I shall strike it out of the list. May the list soon get black! though at present I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper. (A prophecy! a prophecy, 1845!). [April 1842 introduces a number of quotations from Carlyle's Miscellaneous Writings, "Characteristics," some clear and crisp, others sinking into Carlyle's own vein of speculative mysticism, e.g.] "In the mind as in the body the sign of health is unconsciousness." "Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation." "Genius is ever a secret to itself." "The healthy understanding, we should say, is neither the argumentative nor the Logical, but the Intuitive, for the end of understanding is not to prove and find reasons but to know and believe" (!) "The ages of heroism are not ages of Moral Philosophy. Virtue, when it is philosophised of, has become aware of itself, is sickly and beginning to decline." [At the same time more electrical experiments are recorded; and theories are advanced with pros and cons to account for the facts observed. The last entry was made three years later:--] October 1845.--I have found singular pleasure--having accidentally raked this Buchlein from a corner of my desk--in looking over these scraps of notices of my past existence; an illustration of J. Paul's saying that a man has but to write down his yesterday's doings, and forthwith they appear surrounded with a poetic halo. But after all, these are but the top skimmings of these five years' living. I hardly care to look back into the seething depths of the working and boiling mass that lay beneath all this froth, and indeed I hardly know whether I could give myself any clear account of it. Remembrances of physical and mental pain...absence of sympathy, and thence a choking up of such few ideas as I did form clearly within my own mind. Grief too, yet at the misfortune of others, for I have had few properly my own; so much the worse, for in that case I might have said or done somewhat, but here was powerless. Oh, Tom, trouble not thyself about sympathy; thou hast two stout legs and young, wherefore need a staff? Furthermore, it is twenty minutes past two, and time to go to bed. Buchlein, it will be long before my secretiveness remains so quiet again; make the most of what thou hast got. CHAPTER 1.2. 1841-1846.