He was interested in his work, and very popular with the boys.
"My experience of life generally gives me a strong impulse in favour of Determinism; that is to say, the system which considers the histories of nations, the lives of individuals, their very deeds and words, to be all part of a vast unalterable design: and whose dealing with the past, with each event, indeed, as it occurs, is thus nothing but interpretation, an earnest endeavour to exclude regret or disappointment, and to see how best to link each fact in our past on with what we know of ourselves, to see its bearing on our individual case.

Of course this will operate with our view of the future too, but only in a general way, to minimize ambition and anxiety.

It produces, in fact, exactly the same effect as a perfect 'faith;' indeed, it is hard to distinguish the two, except that faith is the instinctive practice of the theory of Determinism.
"Now, the more I work at education, the more I am driven into Determinism; it seems that we can hardly regulate tendency, in fact as if the schoolmaster's only duty was to register change.

A boy comes to a place like this, [Greek: mnemonikos] and [Greek: philomathes], and [Greek: euphyes], as Ascham calls it, in other respects; he is not exposed, let us say, to any of the temptations which extraordinary charms of face or manner seem always to entail upon their possessors, and he leaves it just the same, except that the natural propensities are naturally developed; whereas a boy with precisely the same educational and social advantages but without a predisposition to profit by them leaves school hardly altered in person or mind.

It is true that circumstances alter character--that can not be disputed; but circumstances are precisely what we can not touch.