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I came to philosophy quite naturally as a consequence of my youthful theological environment. Not that I ever had the itch of the metaphysician to make a rational cosmos of my own, for I did not feel the need for such a contraption. The cosmology of the elder Calvinism, with its anthropomorphism and its material penalties and rewards, I never consciously rejected. It simply faded out of the air, since it meant nothing to me. I remember that an ancient relative assured me that Sir Walter Scott, having neglected certain evangelical experiences, was no doubt in torment; the news gave me much satisfaction, for the prospect of such company removed for me any fear of the infernal regions; thenceforward, like Dante’s Farinata degli Uberti, I “entertained great scorn for Hell.” But the fundamentals of the Christian religion were so entwined with my nature that I never found occasion to question them. I wanted no philosophy to rationalise them, for they seemed to me completely rational. Philosophy was to me always an intellectual exercise, like mathematics, not the quest for a faith.

I had begun to read in the subject long before I took the philosophy classes at the University, my first love being Descartes, to whom I was introduced by our Tweeddale neighbour, Professor John Veitch, the last of the Schoolmen. Henry Jones was the Moral Philosophy professor at Glasgow, and with him I formed a life-long friendship, for a braver, wiser, kinder human being never lived. But the semi-religious Hegelianism then in vogue, first preached by Edward Caird and continued by Jones, did not greatly attract me, and I owed allegiance to no school. I read widely, with the consequence that when I went to Oxford I found that I had done most of the work for the final examination, and had leisure there to read more widely than ever.

Looking back, my industry fills me with awe. Before I left Glasgow I had read and analysed many of the English and Scottish philosophers, most of Kant, and a variety of lesser folk. At Oxford I read—with difficulty and imperfect comprehension—a large part of Hegel. I kept up this conscientious study right to the eve of the Great War. Then alas! I fell away, for I found, like Henry James, that history began to oust philosophy from my affections. Science, apart from what I picked up as a field-naturalist, was practically unknown to me, though I learned a certain amount of physics from my philosophical reading. That was the biggest gap in my education.

My interests, as I have said, lay not in the search for a creed, but in the study of the patterns which different thinkers made out of the universe. I had a tidy mind and liked to arrange thing in compartments even when I did not take the arrangement too seriously. This meant that inevitably I missed much; quidquid recipitur, recipitur ad modum recipientis. My quest for truth unlike Plato’s, wholly “lacked the warmth of desire.” It was a mental gymnastic, for I had neither the uneasiness nor the raptures of the true metaphysician. “Philosophy,” Sir Isaac Newton once wrote, “is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her.” I loved the intricacies of argumentation. A proof is that while I am not conscious of having ever argued about religion, or about politics except professionally, I was always very ready to dispute about philosophy. I would have been puzzled to set down my views as to the nature of thought and reality, for they were constantly changing. I never considered it necessary to harmonise my conclusions in a system. Had I been a professed philosopher I should have been forced to crystallise my thought, but, as it was, I could afford to keep it, so to speak, in solution. L’ineptie consiste à, vouloir conclure. I was of the opinion of the Scottish metaphysician that it is more important that a philosophy should be reasoned than that it should be true.

But two conclusions—or rather inclinations—emerged from my studies, and still abide with me.

Plato, not the system-maker but the poet, had a profound influence on my mind. Platonism was to me not a creed but a climate of opinion, the atmosphere in which my thoughts moved. Such an atmosphere is largely the consequence of temperament, and I think I was born with the same temperament as the Platonists of the early seventeenth century, who had what Walter Pater has called “a sensuous love of the unseen,” or, to put it more exactly, who combined a passion for the unseen and the eternal with a delight in the seen and the temporal. Dieu ne défend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent à revenir à lui. If men are either Platonists or Aristotelians then my category was certainly the first.

Again, my philosophical reading left me with certain intellectual habits—a dislike of grandiose mechanical systems, and a distrust of generalities. Having only one or two strong convictions, which might well be called prejudices, I was inclined to be critical of a superfluity of dogmas. Arthur Balfour’s Defence of Philosophic Doubt and Foundations of Belief which fell into my hands, increased this temperamental bias. I developed in most subjects, and notably in politics, a kind of relativism—a belief in degrees of truth and differing levels of reality—which made me judge systems by their historical influence and practical efficiency rather than by their logical perfections. I began to admire Carlyle’s “swallowers of formulas.” There were eternal truths, I decided, but not very many, and even these required frequent spring-cleanings. I became tolerant of most human moods, except intolerance. It was a point of view which I have since seen cause to modify, but it was perhaps a salutary one at that stage in my life.