How it came about that a kindly friend, the rector of our parish, thought it worth while to bid a school-boy in his 'teens to tackle Berkeley's Principles and earlier Dialogues was on this wise. I may have mentioned an incident at my grandfather's table, years before, when he gravely asserted that if the housekeeper, the cook, the errand boy, the shopman, and their maker, had not thought of sausages there would be no sausages for breakfast; and that if none of us saw them, smelled them, or tasted them, we should have no idea of there being such things as sausages. He then plied poor little me with puzzling questions, to my great discomfort. "I like to make the youngsters think," he would say on such occasions. And the autobiographical point is that he did make a youngster think.Anyhow, in some such way as this, the good rector and I slid on to the topic. He, too, plied me with questions, sympathetically amused, no doubt, by my rather callow interest, very shallow knowledge, and quite confident, common-sense, Johnsonian attitude. Then ho said: "Why not read Berkeley at first hand, just as you read Wordsworth or Shelley" (of whom we had been talking) ? "Might it not be well to do so before expressing a third-hand opinion based on someone's second-hand rendering which, after all, shows only his reaction to the problem under discussion? Drink always at the fountain-head in matters in which you are really interested." I did so; and this was my first-hand introduction to philosophy. I can date it as near the close of my school-days because I can picture myself sitting in the hedge-shade in a meadow near a bend of a familiar stream. Never mind rod and line and possible perch. Here was Berkeley (in blue-grey boards) teaching me to fish for ideas in the deeper waters of the mind.And now, after more than sixty years, I ask: What was then my reaction to his teaching? I find it hard to say. My then-reaction is so colored by now-reaction that I cannot be sure what it then was.Herein lies a difficulty in any autobiographical sketch which purports to deal with one's mental development. It is a story of oneself in the past, read in the light of one's present self. There is much supplementary inference-often erroneous inference-wherein 237
