his work, and very popular with the boys.

"My experience of life generally gives me a strong impulse in favour
of Determinism; that is to say, the system which considers the
histories of nations, the lives of individuals, their very deeds and
words, to be all part of a vast unalterable design: and whose dealing
with the past, with each event, indeed, as it occurs, is thus nothing
but interpretation, an earnest endeavour to exclude regret or
disappointment, and to see how best to link each fact in our past on
with what we know of ourselves, to see its bearing on our individual
case. Of course this will operate with our view of the future too,
but only in a general way, to minimize ambition and anxiety. It
produces, in fact, exactly the same effect as a perfect 'faith;'
indeed, it is hard to distinguish the two, except that faith is the
instinctive practice of the theory of Determinism.

"Now, the more I work at education, the more I am driven into
Determinism; it seems that we can hardly regulate tendency, in fact
as if the schoolmaster's only duty was to register change. A boy
comes to a place like this, μνημονὶκος and φιλομάθης,
and εὐφύης, as Ascham calls it, in other respects; he is not
exposed, let us say, to any of the temptations which extraordinary
charms of face or manner seem always to entail upon their possessors,
and he leaves it just the same, except that the natural propensities
are naturally developed; whereas a boy with precisely the same
educational and social advantages but without a predisposition to
profit by them leaves school hardly altered in person or mind. It is
true that circumstances alter character—that can not be disputed;
but circumstances are precisely what we can not touch. A boy,
εὐφύης as I have described, brought up as a street-arab, would only