In 1810, at the age of seventeen, he entered University College, Oxford. There he studied and wrote unceasingly. With a strong predilection for metaphysics, he devoted himself in particular to the great masters of dialectics, Locke and Hume, and to their chief representatives in French philosophy. Ardent and enthusiastic in the pursuit of truth, he sought to enlarge his knowledge and ideas from every possible quarter, and he engaged in correspondence with distinguished persons, suggested to him by choice or chance, with whom he discussed the most interesting philosophical questions. Like all truly fruitful minds, the youthful inquirer was not satisfied with the _dicta_ of mere authority, or with the _consensus_, however general, of past ages, and he hesitated not, in matters of opinion in which every well-instructed intelligence is capable of judging for itself, to bring to the test of right reason the most widely-received dogmas of Antiquity. Actuated by this spirit, rather than by any matured convictions, and wishing to elicit sincere as well as exhaustive argument on the deepest of all metaphysical inquiries, in an unfortunate moment for himself, he caused to be printed an abstract of anti-theistic speculations, drawn from David Hume and other authorities, presented in a series of mathematically-expressed propositions. Copies of this modest thesis of two pages were sent either by the author, or by some other hand, to the heads of his College. The clerical dignitaries, listening to the dictates of outraged authority, rather than influenced by calm reflection, which would have, perhaps, shewn them the useless injustice of so extreme a measure, proceeded at once to expel him from the University.[233] That in spite of this impetuous attack upon the stereotyped presentations of Theism, Shelley had an eminently religious temperament has been well insisted upon by a recent biographer:--