Findlay’s brother, George, seven years his elder provided him with a copy of the Wallace translation of Hegel’s Logic (for which Findlay was to later write an extensive introduction), and this, together with Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, were the first philosophical works he read seriously upon entering university in 1919. Of Hegel’s Logic, Findlay writes:
It has been my constant companion throughout my life, and Hegel, like the moon, has taken up his stance at the end of every vista, shedding light as readily on naturalism and realism as on idealism and mysticism, and being reflected in Wittgenstein or Principia Mathematica as much as in Neoplatonism or Scholastic Theology (My Life, p. 4).
As a youth, and even into adulthood, Findlay enjoyed acting, and for a time as an adolescent and young man he tried his hand as a poet, but by the end of the first World War his interests became fixed upon religion and mysticism, which he pursued as a student at the University of Pretoria.