when i look and try to recover those early intentions of mine i am astonished at the way in which i took them ready-made from the world immediately about me. in some way i seem to have stopped looking—if ever i had begun looking—at the heights and depths above and below that immediate life. i seem to have regarded these profounder realities no more during this phase of concentration than a cow in a field regards the sky. my father's vestments, the burnmore altar, the harbury pulpit and mr. siddons, stood between me and the idea of god, so that it needed years and much bitter disillusionment before i discovered my need of it. and i was as wanting in subtlety as in depth. we did no logic nor philosophy at harbury, and at oxford it was not so much thought we came to deal with as a mistranslation and vulgarization of ancient and alien exercises in thinking. there is no such effective serum against philosophy as the scholarly decoction of a dead philosopher. the philosophical teaching of oxford at the end of the last century was not so much teaching as a protective inoculation. the stuff was administered with a mysterious gilding of greek and reverence, old hegel's monstrous web was the ultimate modernity, and plato, that intellectual journalist-artist, that bright, restless experimentalist in ideas, was as it were the god of wisdom, only a little less omniscient (and on the whole more of a scholar and a gentleman) than the god of fact....

so i fell back upon the empire in my first attempts to unify my life. i would serve the empire. that should be my total significance. there was a roman touch, i perceive, in this devotion. just how or where i should serve the empire i had not as yet determined. at times i thought of the civil service, in my more ambitious moments i turned my thoughts to politics. but it was doubtful whether my private expectations made the last a reasonable possibility.

i would serve the empire.