Like Bacon, he would rather believe all the legends of the Talmud than that this universal frame was without a mind.
Of the questions which absorbed High Churchmen he said, "One might as well be interested in the amours of the heathen gods." On the other hand, he had no sympathy with the new school of specialists, the devotees of original research.

He believed in education as a training of the mental faculties, and thought that undergraduates should learn to use their own minds.

"I can see what books the boys have read," he observed, after examining for the Arnold Prize, "but I cannot see that they make any use of what they have read.

They seem to have power of assimilation." The study of authorities at first hand, to which he had given so much of his own time, he regarded as the work of a few, and as occupation for later years.

The faculty of thinking, and the art of writing, could not be learned too soon.
Few indeed were the old friends who remained at Oxford to welcome him back.