From the varied literary forms in which he expressed himself, also, we are led to infer that in the domain of literature he was still only feeling his way.
If the diversity of his gifts thus distracted him, his emotional experiences, it will appear, were not more favourable to a settled aim and purpose.

One paroxysm of passion succeeded another, with the result that he was eventually, in self-preservation, driven to make a complete breach with his past, and to seek deliverance in a new set of conditions under which he might attain the self-control after which he had hitherto vainly striven.

This prolonged conflict with himself was doubtless primarily due to his own inherited temperament, but it was also in large measure owing to the character of the society and of the time in which the period of his youth was passed.

Had he been born half a century earlier--that is to say, in a time when the current speculation was bound up with a mechanical philosophy, and when the limits of emotion were conditioned by strict conventional standards--he might have been a youth of eccentric humours, but the morbid fancies and wandering affections that consumed him could not have come within his experience.

But by the time when he began to think and feel, Rousseau had written and opened the flood-gates of the emotions, and Sterne had shown how accepted conventions might appear in the light of a capricious wit and fancy which probed the surface of things.