I supposed to be the level of these other boys,—a predisposition which did not prepare me for social success in the place in which I was destined to pass the next stage of my development, namely San Francisco.
When we went to live in San Francisco, I for the first time saw, first San Francisco Bay, and then the Ocean itself, which fascinated me, but which for a long time taught me little.
About June 1866, I began to attend a large Grammar School in San Francisco. I was one of about a thousand boys. The ways of training were new to me. My comrades very generally found me disagreeably striking in my appearance, by reason of the fact that I was redheaded, freckled, countrified, quaint, and unable to play boys' games. The boys in question gave me my first introduction to the 'majesty of the community.' The introduction was impressively disciplinary and persistent. On the whole it seemed to me 'not joyous but grievous.' In the end it probably proved to be for my good. Many years later, in a lecture contained in the first volume of my Problem of Christianity, I summarized what I remember of the lesson of the training which my schoolmates very frequently gave me, in what I there have to say about the meaning which lies behind the Pauline doctrine of original sin, as set forth in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.
Yet my mates were not wholly unkind, and I remember lifelong friendships which I formed in that Grammar School, and which I still can enjoy whenever I meet certain of my dear California friends.
In the year 1871, I began to attend the University of California, where I received my first degree in 1875.
The principal philosophical influences of my undergraduate years were: 1. The really very great and deep effect produced upon me by the teaching of Professor Joseph LeConte,—himself a former pupil of Agassiz, a geologist, a comparatively early defender and exponent of the Darwinian theory, and a great light in the firmament of the University of California of those days; 2. The personal influence of Edward Rowland Sill, who was my teacher in English, during the last two years of my
