I returned, as I said, with a sense of serene pleasure and security to my work; but that serenity did not last long. What I had seen with Amroth, on that day of wandering, filled me with a strange restlessness, and a yearning for I knew not what. I plunged into my studies with determination rather than ardour, and I set myself to study what is the most difficult problem of all--the exact limits of individual responsibility. I had many conversations on the point with one of my teachers, a young man of very wide experience, who combined in an unusual way a close scientific knowledge of the subject with a peculiar emotional sympathy. He told me once that it was the best outfit for the scientific study of these problems, when the heart anticipated the slower judgment of the mind, and set the mind a goal, so to speak, to work up to; though he warned me that the danger was that the mind was often reluctant to abandon the more indulgent claims of the heart; and he advised me to mistrust alike scientific conclusions and emotional inferences. I had a very memorable conversation with him on the particular question of responsibility, which I will here give. "The mistake," I said to him, "of human moralists seems to me to be, that they treat all men as more or less equal in the matter of moral responsibility. How often," I added, "have I heard a school preacher tell boys that they could not all be athletic or clever or popular, but that high principle and moral courage were things within the reach of all. Whereas the more that I studied human nature, the more did the power of surveying and judging one's own moral progress, and the power of enforcing and executing the dictates of the conscience, seem to me faculties, like other faculties. Indeed, it appears to me," I said, "that on the one hand there are people who have a power of moral discrimination, when dealing with the retrospect of their actions, but no power of obeying the claims of principle, when confronted with a situation involving moral strain; while on the other hand there seem to me to be some few men with a great and resolute power of will, capable of swift decision and firm action, but without any instinct for morality at all."