Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/524

508 born non-conformist. The Bible stories fascinated me. The observance of Sunday aroused from an early time a certain more or less passive resistance, which was stubborn, although seldom, I think, openly rebellious.

The earliest connected story that I independently read was the Apocalypse, from a large print New Testament, which I found on the table in our living room. The Apocalypse did not tend to teach me early to acquire very clear ideas. On the other hand, I did early receive a great deal of training in dialectics, from the sister nearest to me in age. She was three years my senior. She was very patiently persistent in showing me the truth. I was nearly as persistent in maintaining my own views. Since she was patient, I believe that we seldom quarrelled in any violent way. But on occasion, as I remember, our dear mother used, when the wrangling grew too philosophical, to set me the task of keeping still for an hour. The training was needed, but it was never wholly effective in suppressing for any great length of time the dialectical insistence.

I was not a very active boy. I had no physical skill or agility. I was timid and ineffective, but seem to have been, on the whole, prevailingly cheerful, and not extremely irritable, although I was certainly more or less given to petty mischief, in so far as my sisters did not succeed in keeping me under their kindly watch.

Since I grew during the time of the civil war, heard a good deal about it from people near me, but saw nothing of the consequences of the war through any closer inspection, I remained as vague about this matter as about most other life problems,—vague but often enthusiastic. My earliest great patriotic experience came at the end of the civil war, when the news of the assassination of Lincoln reached us. Thenceforth, as I believe, I had a country as well as a religious interest. Both of these were ineffective interests, except in so far as they were attached to the already mentioned enthusiasms, and were clarified and directed by the influence of my mother and sisters. Of boys outside the household I so far knew comparatively little, but had a considerable tendency, as I remember, to preach down to what