But the arguments
engendered were flimsy, inconsequent, and fantastic enough; the
dialectic flashed to and fro, never very convincing, and mostly
intended to aggravate rather than to persuade. Even at the time it had
often appeared to Hugh to be shallow and flimsy. He had seldom heard a
subject debated with any thoroughness or justice, and he had learnt far
more from the preparation of occasional papers framed to initiate a
discussion, than from any discussion that followed. The best thoughts
that Hugh had apprehended in those days had been the thoughts that he
had won from books; his mind had opened rapidly then, in the direction
of a kind of poetical metaphysic, not deep speculation on the ultimate
nature of things, so much as reflection on the more psychological
problems of character and personality. It seemed to Hugh that his own
mind, and the minds of those with whom he had lived, had been a mass of
prejudices, of half-formed and inconsistent theories. None of them had
had any policy into which they fitted the ideas that came to them; but
a new and attractive idea had been seized upon, on its own merits,
without any reference to other theories, or with any desire to
co-ordinate it with other ideas, which were indeed just thrust aside to
make room for the new one.

Hugh's idea of mental progress, in his later years, was the slow
dwelling upon some thought, the quiet application of it to other
thoughts. It seemed an inversion of the ordinary method of progress,
if the biographies that he read were true. Taking the case, for
instance, of the particular man whom Hugh had known, and whose
biography he had studied, he seemed in youth to have been generous,
fearless, candid, and ardent, and life must have been to him a process
of hardening and encrusting with prejudice; he seemed to have begun
with a bright faith in ideas, and to have ended with a dull belief in
organisations. He had begun by being thrilled with the beauty of
virtue, and he had ended by supporting the G.F.S. Hugh's experience
was the exact opposite of this. He had begun, he thought, by being
loaded and burdened with prejudices and stupid notions, acquired he
knew not how; he had not doubted the value of authority, tradition,
usage; as life went on, it seemed to him that he had got rid of his
prejudices one by one, and that he had arrived, at the age of forty, at
valuing sincerity, sympathy, simplicity, and candour, above dogma and
accumulated b