Nearly all that we call education was to him but a means to bring us under the despotism of life; and I remember the bewilderment of a schoolmaster who asked about the education of children and was told to ‘teach them fairy tales, and that they did not possess even their own bodies.’ I think he would not have taught anybody anything that had to be written in prose, for he said, very seriously, ‘I have thought much about it, and I have never been able to discover any reason why prose should exist.’ I think he would not have trained anybody in anything but in the arts and in philosophy, which sweeps the pathway before them, for he certainly thought, as William Blake did, that the ‘imagination is the man himself,’ and can, if it be strong enough, work every miracle. A man had come to him in London, and had said, ‘My wife believes that you have the wisdom of the East and can cure her neuralgia, from which she has suffered for years.’ He had answered: ‘Are you certain that she believes that? because, if you are, I can cure her.’ He had gone to her and made a circle round her and recited a poem in Sanscrit, and she had never had neuralgia since. He recited the poem to us, and was very disappointed because we did not know by the sound that it was a description of the spring. Not only did he think that the imaginative arts were the only things that were quite sinless, but he spent more than half a day proving, by many subtle and elaborate arguments, that ‘art for art’s sake’ was the only sinless doctrine, for any other would hide the shadow of the world as it exists in the mind of God by shadows of the accidents and illusions of life, and was but Sadducean blasphemy. Religion existed also for its own sake; and every soul quivered between two emotions, the desire to possess things, to make them a portion of its egotism, and a delight in just and beautiful things for their own sake—and all religions were a doctrinal or symbolical crying aloud of this delight. He would not give his own belief a name for fear he might seem to admit that there could be religion that expressed another delight, and if one urged him too impetuously, he would look embarrassed and say, ‘This body is a Brahmin.’ All other parts of religion were unimportant, for even our desire of immortality was no better than our other desires. Before I understood him, I asked what he would answer to one who began the discussion by denying the immortality of the soul, for the accident of a discussion with religious people had set him grafting upon this stock, and he said, ‘I would say to him, What has that to do with you?’