In his Memoirs, Pattison told the story of a life devoted from boyhood to the pursuit of self-improvement through study. His was to be a life consecrated to the cultivation of the mind, supported by a college fellowship. This goal was instilled in him by his father's loyalty to Oxford, and it was strengthened by his self-discovery as an undergraduate; and Pattison scarcely deviated from it for the rest of his life. This was no ordinary career ambition. When Pattison conceived his purpose the academic profession was unknown in England. College fellows who remained in residence for life would usually be considered failures. Rare were those, such as Newman, who envisaged ‘perpetual residence even unto death in my University’. So in taking the academic vocation as his life's purpose, Pattison was not choosing to play a role pre-determined for him by convention. On the contrary, the vocation of the academic or don was invented in Pattison's lifetime, and Pattison was one of those at the forefront of the effort to reimagine that vocation in an era of secularization. For Newman, the don's vocation was a subordinate aspect of the priestly vocation. But even at the height of his commitment to the Oxford Movement, that was never Pattison's understanding. On the other hand, the idea of a life of study certainly possessed a spiritual significance for Pattison, and he continued to invest it with a profound spiritual seriousness long after he had become detached from a working Christian faith.