looked forward, for example, to a considerable increase of freedom in
the relations between the sexes, though without pretending to define
exactly what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions of that
freedom. This opinion was connected in him with no sensuality either of
a theoretical or of a practical kind. He anticipated, on the contrary,
as one of the beneficial effects of increased freedom, that the
imagination would no longer dwell upon the physical relation and its
adjuncts, and swell this into one of the principal objects of life; a
perversion of the imagination and feelings, which he regarded as one of
the deepest seated and most pervading evils in the human mind. In
psychology, his fundamental doctrine was the formation of all human
character by circumstances, through the universal Principle of
Association, and the consequent unlimited possibility of improving the
moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education. Of all his
doctrines none was more important than this, or needs more to be
insisted on; unfortunately there is none which is more contradictory to
the prevailing tendencies of speculation, both in his time and since.

These various opinions were seized on with youthful fanaticism by the
little knot of young men of whom I was one: and we put into them a
sectarian spirit, from which, in intention at least, my father was
wholly free. What we (or rather a phantom substituted in the place of
us) were sometimes, by a ridiculous exaggeration, called by others,
namely a "school," some of us for a time really hoped and aspired to be.
The French _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century were the examples we
sought to imitate, and we hoped to accomplish no less results. No one of
the set went to so great excesses in his boyish ambition as I did; which
might be shown by many particulars, were it not an useless waste of
space and time.