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My father began my education when I was three years old. By eight I had read all the Greek historians and the major Greek philosophers in the original. By twelve I had completed a thorough course in logic and political economy. At fourteen I went to France for a year and learned chemistry, botany, and higher mathematics.

He was making a proof-of-concept: a demonstration that what passed for natural talent in most men was merely early instruction. I was his experiment. At twenty I had a mental crisis and could not feel anything for about a year. My father's education had produced a reasoning machine without the capacity for joy.

I recovered. The recovery is what I would recommend to anyone educated as I was: read Wordsworth. Not because poetry is opposed to reason but because it demonstrates that precise observation of the world produces both analytical clarity and feeling simultaneously. The crisis passed when I stopped treating my own unhappiness as an intellectual problem.