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each philospher was inseparably connected with the man he
was. When you knew that you could guess to a great extent
the philosophy he wrote. It looked as though you did not
act in a certain way because you thought in a certain way,
but rather that you thought in a certain way because you
were made in a certain way. Truth had nothing to do with
it. There was no such thing as truth. Each man was his own
philosopher, and the elaborate systems which the great men
of the past had composed were only valid for the writers.
The thing then was to discover what one was and one’s
system of philosophy would devise itself. It seemed to Philip
that there were three things to find out: man’s relation to the
world he lives in, man’s relation with the men among whom
he lives, and finally man’s relation to himself. He made an
elaborate plan of study.
The advantage of living abroad is that, coming in contact
with the manners and customs of the people among whom
you live, you observe them from the outside and see that they
have not the necessity which those who practise them believe.
You cannot fail to discover that the beliefs which to you are
self-evident to the foreigner are absurd. The year in Ger-
many, the long stay in Paris, had prepared Philip to receive
the sceptical teaching which came to him now with such a
feeling of relief. He saw that nothing was good and nothing
was evil; things were merely adapted to an end. He read The
Origin of Species. It seemed to offer an explanation of much
that troubled him. He was like an explorer now who has rea-
soned that certain natural features must present themselves,
and, beating up a broad river, finds here the tributary that

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