These opinions, true in the main, were held in an exaggerated and violent manner by the thinkers with whom I was now most accustomed to compare notes, and who, as usual with a reaction, ignored that half of the truth which the thinkers of the eighteenth century saw.

But though, at one period of my progress, I for some time undervalued that great century, I never joined in the reaction against it, but kept as firm hold of one side of the truth as I took of the other.

The fight between the nineteenth century and the eighteenth always reminded me of the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other black.

I marvelled at the blind rage with which the combatants rushed against one another.

I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many of Coleridge's sayings about half truths; and Goethe's device, "many-sidedness," was one which I would most willingly, at this period, have taken for mine.
The writers by whom, more than by any others, a new mode of political thinking was brought home to me, were those of the St.Simonian school in France.