He roamed at large over the varied heights that tempt our curiosity, as the dawn of intelligence first lights them up one after another with bewitching visions and illusive magic.

"All my studies," Burke wrote in 1746, when he was in the midst of them, "have rather proceeded from sallies of passion, than from the preference of sound reason; and, like all other natural appetites, have been very violent for a season, and very soon cooled, and quite absorbed in the succeeding.

I have often thought it a humorous consideration to observe and sum up all the madness of this kind I have fallen into, this two years past.

First, I was greatly taken with natural philosophy; which, while I should have given my mind to logic, employed me incessantly.

This I call my _furor mathematicus_.