Several years ago, when we were crossing the Atlantic on the same ship, Mr. Clemens told me that while he was living in Hartford in the early eighties, I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fortnightly club to which he belonged. This club was composed chiefly of men whose deepest interests were concerned with the theological and the religiously orthodox. One of his friends, to whom he read this paper in advance, solemnly warned him not to read it before the club. For he felt confident that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt as to the existence of free will, and declaring without hesitation that every man was under the immitigable compulsion of his temperament, his training, and his environment, would appear unspeakably shocking, heretical and blasphemous to the orthodox members of that club. “I did not read that paper,” Mr. Clemens said to me, “but I put it away, resolved to let it stand the corrosive test of time. Every now and then, when it occurred to me, I used to take that paper out and read it, to compare its views with my own later views. From time to time I added something to it. But I never found, during that quarter of a century, that my views had altered in the slightest degree. I had a few copies published not long ago; but there is not the slightest evidence in the book to indicate its authorship.” A few days later he gave me a copy, and when I read that book, I found these words, among others, in the prefatory note: “Every thought in them (these papers) has been thought (and accepted as unassailable truth) by millions upon millions of men--and concealed, kept private. Why did they not speak out? Because they dreaded (and could not bear) the disapproval of the people around them. Why have I not published? The same reason has restrained me, I think. I can find no other.” 'What is Man?' propounds at length, through the medium of a dialogue between a Young Man and an Old Man, the doctrine that “Beliefs are acquirements; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject to change; nothing whatever can change temperament.” He enunciates the theory, which seems to me both brilliant and original, that there can be no such person as a permanent seeker after truth.