Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/31

 of laws of supply and demand in their laisser-faire environment.

Four years at Oxford, chiefly spent on the literary, historical, and philosophical study of the Latin and Greek civilizations, contributed, however, not a little towards the rationalism and humanism which later on I strove to apply to economics. Some humanity may be got out of the study of Literae Humaniores. Though my failure as an examinee came as a painful shock to my intellectual self-assurance, it did not wholly disable me from receiving the contributions which Plato and Aristotle made to the permanent possessions of the human mind, what to think and feel, how to think and feel, about man’s inner nature and his place in the universe, and the methods of testing and achieving knowledge. Though I never became a profound student of ancient thought and literature, I think that my mind received from these years of study a disposition and a valuation that were of immense service in liberating me from the easy acceptance of the current ideas and feelings of an age rightly designated as materialistic and narrowly utilitarian. Something more I feel that I received from the atmosphere of an Oxford in which Jowett, T. H. Green, and Mark Pattison were leading figures, though my only personal contact, not a close one, was with Pattison, the master of my college, in his declining years.