The Life of George Cabot Lodge Author:Henry Adams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III Early in his college course, the young man had acquired a taste for Schopenhauer. The charm of Schopenhauer is due greatly to his clearness of tho... more »ught and his excellence of style, — merits rare among German philosophers, — but another of his literary attractions is the strong bent of his thought towards Oriental and especially Buddhistic ideals and methods. At about the same time it happened that Sturgis Bigelow returned to Boston from a long residence in Japan, and brought with him an atmosphere of Buddhistic training and esoteric culture quite new to the realities of Boston and Cambridge. The mystical side of religion had vanished from the Boston mind, if it ever existed there, which could have been at best, only in a most attenuated form; and Boston was as fresh wax to new impressions. The oriental ideas were full of charm, and the oriental training was fullof promise. Young Lodge, tormented by the old problems of philosophy and religion, felt the influence of Sturgis Bigelow deeply, for Bigelow was the closest intimate of the family, and during the summer his island of Tuckanuck, near Nantucket, was the favorite refuge and resource for the Lodges. As time went on, more and more of the young man's letters were addressed to Bigelow. Returning home after the winter of 1895-96 in Paris, he found himself more than ever harrowed by the conflict of interests and tastes. He went to Newport in August, for a few days, and rebelled against all its standards. "I hate the philistine- plutocrat atmosphere of this place, and it tends not to diminish my views anent modern civilization and the money power. I sincerely thank God I shall never be a rich man, and never will I, if my strength holds. The world cannot be fought with its own weapons; David fought Goliath with a slin...« less