ndeavour 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, [Greek: mnemonikos] and [Greek: philomathes],
and [Greek: euphyes], 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, [Greek:
euphyes] as I have described, brought up as a street-arab, would only
so far profit by it as to be slightly less vicious and disgusting than
his companions. But education, which we speak of as a panacea for all
ills, only deals with what it finds, and does not, as we ought to
claim, rub down bad points and accentuate good, and it is this, that
perhaps more than anything else has made me a Determinist, that
the very capacity for change and improvement is so native to some
characters, and so utterly lacking to others. A man can in real truth
do nothing of himself, though there are all possible varieties--from
the man who can see his deficiencies and make them up, through the
man who sees his weak points and can not strengthen them, to the
spiritually blind who can not even see them. I may of course belong to
the latter class myself--it is the one thing about which no one can
decide for himself--but an inherent contempt for certain parts of my
character seems to hint to me that it is not so."

It will be seen from the last two letters that his ethical position
was settling itself.