At twelve Huxley[20] became an omnivorous reader, and two or three years later
devoured Hamilton's Logic and became deeply interested in metaphysics. At
fourteen he saw and participated in his first post-mortem examination, was left
in a strange state of apathy by it, and dates his life-long dyspepsia to this
experience. His training was irregular; he taught himself German with a book in
one hand while he made hay with the other; speculated about the basis of matter,
soul, and their relations, on radicalism and conservatism; and reproached himself
that he did not work and get on enough. At seventeen he attempted a
comprehensive classification of human knowledge, and having finished his
survey, resolved to master the topics one after another, striking them out from
his table with ink as soon us they were done. "May the list soon get black,
although at present I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper." Beneath
the top skimmings of these years he afterward conceived seething depths
working beneath the froth, but could give hardly any account of it. He undertook
the practise of pharmacy, etc.
Women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in their power to reproduce and
describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions of this age; perhaps
because their later lives, on account of their more generic nature, depart less
from this totalizing period, or because, although it is psychologically shorter
than in men, the necessities of earning a livelihood less frequently arrest its full
development, and again because they are more emotional, and feeling constitutes
the chief psychic ingredient of this stage of life, or they dwell more on subjective
states.
Manon Philipon (Madame Roland) was born in 1754. Her father was an
engraver in comfortable circumstances. Her earliest enthusiasm was for the
Bible and Lives of the Saints, and she had almost a mania for reading books of
any kind. In the corner of her father's workshop she would read Plutarch for
hours, dream of the past glories of antiquity, and exclaim, weeping, "Why was I
not born a Greek?" She desired to emulate the brave men of old.
Books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic sentiment,
and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society afforded no opportunity for
heroic living, in her visionary fervor she fell back upon a life of religious
mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St. Elizabeth, and St. Theresa became her new
idols. She longed to follow even to the stake those devout men and women who