Philip was one of the most beautiful of all the spirits I ever
came near. His last life upon earth had been a long one, and he had been
a teacher. I used to tell him that I wished I had been under him as a
pupil, to which he replied, laughing, that I should have found him very
uninteresting. He said to me once that the way in which he had always
distinguished the two kinds of teachers on earth had been by whether
they were always anxious to teach new books and new subjects, or went on
contentedly with the old. "The pleasure," he said, "was in the teaching,
in making the thought clear, in tempting the boys to find out what they
knew all the time; and the oftener I taught a subject the better I liked
it; it was like a big cog-wheel, with a number of little cog-wheels
turning with it. But the men who were always wanting to change their
subjects were the men who thought of their own intellectual interest
first, and very little of the small interests revolving upon it." The
charm of Philip was the charm of extreme ingenuousness combined with
daring insight. He never seemed to be shocked or distressed by anything.
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