etermine. A burnt child fears the fire, an unburnt
child might boldly grasp a glowing coal, but all this would not help
us to determine whether fear is an innate or an acquired tendency or
habit.

All I can say for myself is that my young life and even my later years
were often rendered miserable by the foolish stories of one of my
grandmothers, and that I had to make a strong effort of will before I
could bring myself to walk across a churchyard in the dark. This shows
how much our character is shaped by circumstances, even when we are
least aware of it. I did not believe in ghosts and I was not a coward,
but I felt through life a kind of shiver in dark passages and at the
sound of mysterious noises, and the mere fact that I had to make an
effort to overcome these feelings shows that something had found its
way into my mental constitution that ought never to have been there,
and that caused me, particularly in my younger days, many a moment of
discomfort.

All such experiences constitute what may be called the background of
our life. My first ideas of men and women, and of the world at large,
that is of the unknown world, were formed within the narrow walls of
Dessau, for Dessau was still surrounded by walls, and the gates of the
city were closed every night, though the fears of a foreign enemy were
but small. Of course the views of life prevailing at Dessau were very
narrow, but they were wide enough for our purposes. Though we heard of
large towns like Dresden or Berlin, and of large countries like France
and Italy, my real world was Dessau and its neighbourhood. We had no
interests outside the walls of our town or the frontiers of our
duchy. If we heard of things that had happened at Leipzig or Berlin,
in Paris or London, they had no more reality for us than what we had
read about Abraham, or Romulus and Remus, or Alexander the Great. To
us the pulse of the world seemed to beat in the _Haupt- und
Residenzstadt_ of Dessau, though we knew perfectly well how small it
was in comparison with other towns.

And this, too, has left its impression on my thoughts all through
life, if only by making everything that I saw in later life in such
towns as Leipzig, Berlin, Paris, and London, appear quite
overwhelmingly grand. Boys brought up in any of these large towns
start with a different view of the world, and with a different measure
for what they see in later life. I do not know that they are to be
envied for that, for th