similar effect upon me: at all events I seldom gave it an opportunity.
This, however, was a mere passive state. Long before I had enlarged in
any considerable degree the basis of my intellectual creed, I had
obtained, in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of
the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives
and characters of heroic persons; especially the heroes of philosophy.
The same inspiring effect which so many of the benefactors of mankind
have left on record that they had experienced from Plutarch's _Lives_,
was produced on me by Plato's pictures of Socrates, and by some modern
biographies, above all by Condorcet's _Life of Turgot_; a book well
calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one
of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and
noblest of men. The heroic virtue of these glorious representatives of
the opinions with which I sympathized, deeply affected me, and I
perpetually recurred to them as others do to a favourite poet, when
needing to be carried up into the more elevated regions of feeling and
thought. I may observe by the way that this book cured me of my
sectarian follies. The two or three pages beginning "Il regardait toute
secte comme nuisible," and explaining why Turgot always kept himself
perfectly distinct from the Encyclopedists, sank deeply into my mind.
I left off designating myself and others as Utilitarians, and by the
pronoun "we," or any other collective designation, I ceased to
_afficher_ sectarianism. My real inward sectarianism I did not get rid
of till later, and much more gradually.

About the end of 1824, or beginning of 1825, Mr. Bentham, having lately
got back his papers on Evidence from M. Dumont (whose _Traité des
Preuves Judiciaires_, grounded on them, was then first completed and
published), resolved to have them printed in the original, and bethought
himself of me as capable of preparing them for the press; in the same