“When he found the truth he sought no farther; but from that day forth, with his soldering iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors.” “All training,” he avers, “is one form or another of outside influences, and association is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made him. They train him downward or they train him upward--but they train him; they are at work upon him all the time.” Once asked by Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to write another story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain replied that he had a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him to high honour, and in the other bringing him to the gallows. When Kipling protested vigorously against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic doctrine of 'What is Man?': “Oh, he is real. He's all the boy that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book--because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer's life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.” It was what he called Kismet. It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many ways, that in the days when the blows of fate fell heaviest upon his head, he had lost all faith in the Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what form of religion or theology, atheism or agnosticism, the individual or the nation embraced, the human race remained “indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud.” He never had a tinge of pessimism in his make-up, his beliefs never tended to warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly because he saw in it supreme truth. His ultimate philosophy of life, which he sums up in 'What is Man?', is healthy and right-minded. It is best embodied in the lofty injunction: “Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbour and the community.” Lassalle once said: “History forgives mistakes and failures, but not want of conviction.” In Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to forgive any want of conviction. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Mark Twain, by Archibald Henderson