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 boys confronted with this abstruse introduction came to the conclusion that it was wonderful, but that they had no head for metaphysics because they could not see any sense in it. Schiller very curiously came to the opposite conclusion from the same premise.

Orthodox Oxford was at that time under the sway of the great philosophic Trinity of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, which was supposed somehow to be concordant with or at least allied to the theological Trinity, and therefore fit food for the souls of innocent young men. The third person of the philosophic Trinity was kept much in the dark, because the tutors generally were not fond of reading German. They knew still less of science and apparently did not suspect that Darwin and his evolution might prove to have some bearing upon philosophy.

Schiller took his First Classes at Oxford, although he was given to asking awkward questions and was known to be reading "out of bounds." One of his examiners complained that he used such queer terms in his papers, "solipsism" and "epistemology" for instance.

The years 1893–1897 Schiller spent as instructor at Cornell University, and at the end of that period