The Great Awakening by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Sir Powers Fiske, though far from being a sybarite, possessed a fundamental but crudely developed love of the beautiful. Before all things with him came his devotion to science and scientific investigation. But for his unexpected accession to the title and estates he would, without doubt, have become a denizen of Harley Street, and made his way without difficulty into the front ranks of his profession. With the passing away of all necessity for work came a curious era of half-doubtful dilettanteism, a time during which he read hugely, traveled a good deal, and finally returned to England with the seeds of a great unrest sown in his mind.

Mysticism and psychology, which he had dabbled in at first half-contemptuously, had become serious studies to him. Dimly he felt the fascination of that unending effort which from the days of the Chaldeans had swayed the lives of a long succession of the world's masters, the effort to establish some sort of communication, however faint, however speculative, between the world of known things and the world beyond. At times he found himself moved to the most profound self-ridicule. He would ask himself how it was possible for a man of science seriously to investigate problems whose very foundation must be an assumption. He looked at his walls lined with books, and he smiled grimly as he realized how little, after all, they had taught him. The sum of all that he had learned from them amounted to nothing. Yet he remembered what Spencer Trowse, a fellow student, had said to him. A sudden flush had lightened his thin cheeks, pallid with the ceaseless energy of their student life.