So, setting my face towards the sunset, I became one of the band of "Forty-niners" in California, and remained abroad in the continents and isles of the Pacific, from America passing to Australia, until the intended year of my absence had grown into nearly ten years, and I had experienced well-nigh every vicissitude and extreme which might serve to heighten the consciousness, toughen the fibre, and try the soul of man. But throughout all, the idea of a mission remained with me, gathering force and consistency, until it was made clear to me that not destruction merely, but construction, not the exposure of error but the demonstration of truth, was comprised in it. For I saw that it was possible to reduce religion to a series of first principles, necessary truths and self-evident propositions, and that only in such measure as it was thus reduced and discerned, was it really true and really believed;--in short, that faith and knowledge are identical. To accept a religion on the ground that one had been born in it, and apart from its appeal to the mind and moral conscience, and thus to make it dependent upon the accident of birth and parentage, was to resemble the African savage who for the same reason worships Mumbo Jumbo. How, moreover,--I asked myself--could a religion which was not in accord with first principles, represent a God, Who, to be God, must Himself be the first of, and must comprise all principles; must account logically for all the facts of consciousness, be it unfolded as far as it may? Granting that, as the poet says, "an honest man's the noblest work of God," it was for me no less true that "an honest God's the noblest work of man." And it was precisely such a being that I longed to elaborate out of, or discover in, my own consciousness, confident that the achievement meant the solution of all problems, the rectification of all difficulties, the satisfaction of all aspirations, intellectual, moral, and spiritual. Following such trains of thought, I arrived at the assurance that I had within my own consciousness both the truth itself and the verification of the truth, and that it remained only to find these. Returning to England in 1857, and, after an interval, devoting myself to literature, all that I wrote, whether essay or fiction, represented the endeavour by probing the consciousness to the utmost in every direction to discover a central, radiant, and indefeasible point from which all things could be deduced, and on which, as a pivot they must depend and revolve. I read largely, and went much among people, always in search of aid in my quest; but only with the result of finding that neither from books nor from persons could I even begin to get what I sought, but only from thought.