opposite pursuits, to the youthful Theaetetus, as described in
Plato's dialogue the movements of whose mind Theodorus compares
to the "noiseless flow of oil" from the flask.

He was just fourteen and a half when you left England; he is
now, therefore, nearly twenty-nine. He left me four years ago,
when he was just twenty-five,--about a year after the termination
of his college course, which you know was honorable to him, and
gratifying to me. He then went to spend a year, or a year and a
half, as he supposed, in Germany. His stay (he was not all the
time in Germany, however) was prolonged for more than three years.
In the letters which I received from him, and which gradually
became more rare and more brief, there was (without one symptom
of decay of personal affection) a certain air of gradually
increasing constraint, in relation to the subject which I knew
and felt to be all-important. Alas! my prophetic soul took it
aright; this constraint was the faint penumbra of a disastrous
eclipse indeed! He was not, as so many profess to be, convinced
by any particular book (as that of Strauss, for example) that
the history of Christianity is false; nay, he declares that he
is not convinced of that even now; he is a genuine sceptic, and
is the subject, he says, of invincible doubts. Those doubts have
extended at length to the whole field of theology, and are due
principally, as he himself has owned, to the spectacle of the
interminable controversies which (turn where he would) occupied
the mind of Germany. Even when he returned home he does not appear
to have finally abandoned the notion of the possibility of
constructing some religious system in the place of Christianity;--
this, as he affirms, is a later conviction formed upon him by
examining the systems of such men as have attempted the solution