Hayek displayed an intellectual and academic bent from a very young age. He read fluently and frequently before going to school. At his father's suggestion, Hayek, as a teenager, read the genetic and evolutionary works of Hugo de Vries and the philosophical works of Ludwig Feuerbach. In school Hayek was much taken by one instructor's lectures on Aristotle's ethics. In his unpublished autobiographical notes, Hayek recalled a division between him and his younger brothers who were only few years younger than him, but he believed that they were somehow of a different generation. He preferred to associate with adults.