*

A year after the exposition, Hearn made the acquaintance of a young
Lieutenant Crosby. Young Crosby was a native of Louisiana, educated at
West Point, stationed at the time with his regiment at New Orleans. He
was a person, apparently, of considerable culture. He and Hearn
frequented the same literary circles. Interest in science and philosophy
was as wide-spread in America as in Europe during the course of last
century.

One day Crosby lent his new acquaintance Herbert Spencer's "First
Principles." In his usual vehement, impressionable way Hearn immediately
accepted all the tenets, all the conclusions arrived at. And from that
day began what only can be called an intellectual idolatry for the
colourless analytic English philosopher that lasted till his death.

The terms in which he alludes to him are superexaggerated: "the greatest
mind that this world has yet produced--the mind that systematised all
human knowledge, that revolutionised modern science, that dissipated
materialism forever ... the mind that could expound with equal lucidity,
and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history
of a sun."

Always excitable in argument, he would not be gainsaid, and indeed at
various periods of his life, when people ventured to doubt the soundness
of some of Spencer's conclusions, Hearn would not only refuse to discuss
the subject, but henceforth abstained from holding communication with
the offending individual.

"A memory of long ago ... I am walking upon a granite pavement that
rings like iron, between buildings of granite bathed in the light of a
cloudless noon.... Suddenly, an odd feeling comes to me, with a sort of
tingling shock,--a feeling, or suspicion, of universal illusion. The
pavement, the bulks of hewn stone, the iron rails, and all things
visible, are dreams! Light, colour, form, weight, solidity--all sensed
existences--are but phantoms of being, manifestations only of one
infinite ghostliness for which the language of man has not any word...."

This experience had been produced, he says, by the study of the first
volume of Spencer's "Synthetic Philosophy," which an American friend had
taught him how to read. Very cautious and slow his progress was, like
that of a man mounting for the first time a long series of ladders in
darkness. Reaching the light at last, he caught a sudden new view of
things--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from
that time the w