School was no happier place for him than home.
His inordinate pride, only sharpened by the consciousness of his parents' poverty which bordered
on pauperism, threw him into a state of perpetual
rebellion against comrades and teachers. And all
this time his inner life was tossed hither and
thither by a general intellectual and emotional
restlessness due to an insatiable craving for knowledge. At fifteen years of age he had reached a full
conviction on the irredeemable evilness of life;
and concluded, in a moment of religious exaltation, to dedicate his own earthly existence to the
vicarious expiation of universal sin through the
mortification of the flesh. Then, of a sudden, he
became a voracious reader of rationalistic literature, and turned atheist with almost inconceivable
dispatch, but soon was forced back by remorse
into the pietistic frame of mind,— only to pass
through another reaction immediately after. At
this time he claims that earthly life is a punishment or a probation; but that it lies in man's power
to make it endurable by freeing himself from the
social restraints. He has become a convert to
the fantastic doctrine of Jean Jacques Rousseau,
that man is good by nature but has been depraved
by civilization. Now in his earliest twenties, he
