disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments,
suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my experience
I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from control.

The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was
presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my
mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible
Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the
survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to
survive.

The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the
Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert
Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I
laughed a little and loved him. I remember as early as the City
Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-
begging word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out.
Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten
lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and
skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only
through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for
us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was
a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man
sets itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that
persuasion.

I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these
conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen
or nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters,
just as children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter at