Like Bonifacio he was a great reader, but on different lines. The warehouse porter, hanging by night over such books as he could lay hands upon, was set aflame by the struggles of mankind against oppression, particularly by that which is the epitome and symbol of them all, the French Revolution. Mabini, cool and even-pulsed philosopher, was concerned not so much with the physical aspects of revolution as with its causes. If the human story told true, revolutions were some rebound of the spirit of man against a privileged class that held or sought to hold the rest as bondmen. As this conflict between two main forces occupied so much of the history he was analyzing with his keen sure mind, and as it seemed the only thing there of enduring importance, he molded from its pages a philosophy of human life and its import not unworthy of Jefferson and Mill. The basis of everything good he conceived to be liberty; without liberty there could be no light and no progress. With a coolly measuring eye, as an architect looks at a building, he went over the system of government erected by Spain in the Philippines and estimated its fatal defects as a structure no longer tenable, knowing well that its fall was overdue. Much more than Rizal he seems to have seized the fundamental facts about man’s capacity for self-government and the only way to uncover and develop that capacity. He, too, was of the cloister, and might have slipped likewise into the darling errors of the schoolmen about the magic keys to this wisdom believed to be buried in a classical education. He made no such error. Not even Jefferson was of a clearer faith. He accepted the whole democratic theory of government, not sentimentally but as the ultimate fact in human existence. On philosophical grounds, for unassailable reasons, popular rule was right; in the end the only human wisdom was the general thought. In the verdict of the majority he saw plainly the manifestation of the will of God. He was not influenced by Bonifacio, of whose existence he seems to have been unaware until 1892. As one of the earliest members of La Líga Filipina he may have been influenced at one time by Rizal; but there was little chance and less need that he should be influenced by anybody. His was a mind accustomed to independent action; it seems always to have moved to its own conclusions in its own way.