Feeling that all religions built up on a belief in a God were
collapsing, Europe had long inclined towards the religion of Progress as
the last tenable. Now I perceived as I raised my eyes to the starry
expanse and rejoiced in my favourite stars, Sirius in the Great Dog, and
Vega in the Lyre or Altair in the Eagle, that it, too, was tottering,
this last religion of all.


III.

At school, I had known a score of boys of my own age, and naturally
found few amongst them who could be anything to me. Among the advantages
that the freedom of student life afforded was that of coming in contact
all at once with hundreds of similarly educated young men of one's own
age. Young men made each other's acquaintance at lectures and banquets,
were drawn to one another, or felt themselves repulsed, and elective
affinity or accident associated them in pairs or groups for a longer or
shorter period.

A young fellow whose main passion was a desire for intellectual
enrichment was necessarily obliged to associate with many of the other
young men of his own age, in order to learn to know them, in order,
externally and internally, to gain as much experience as possible and
thereby develop himself.

In the case of many of them, a few conversations were enough to prove
that any fruitful intimacy was out of the question. I came into fleeting
contact with a number of suave, or cold, or too ordinary young students,
without their natures affecting mine or mine theirs. But there were
others who, for some months, engaged my attention to a considerable