To
complain of 'negation' as such while making such negations as these is
to be more entertaining than impressive.

And to be told that, in putting aside these logomachies, he is depriving
himself of intellectual and moral comfort, is for the rationalist no
perturbing experience. He is what he is because he knows the utter
inanity of the theistic declamation about his putting in place of the
'Immeasurable Divine Eye' a 'vast bottomless Eye-Socket'; knows that for
the vast mass of mankind the imagined Eye has been a menace of all their
myriad ills, that its levin slays them like flies, that the iron has
entered uncounted millions of souls who daily prayed for divine succour.
The prate of his 'negation' is as childish as the complaint of the
avowal that we cannot reach the planet Jupiter, not to say the
constellation Hercules: he does but affirm the incontrovertible truth
that an infinite universe cannot be compassed by our thought, and that
to assert its permeation by 'mind'--a finite process of perception and
discrimination, verbally defined as transcending both--is to pay
ourselves with words. To the Berkeleyan formula that existence is only
as perceived, and that without perception there can be no existence, he
answers, similarly, that the first proposition means only that we
perceive what we perceive, and that the second is mere intellectual
nullity, a verbal pretence to unthinkable knowledge. The further
Zenonian frivolity of the denial of an 'external world' needs from him
no further comment than this, that in the terms of the argument
'external' has no meaning, and the proposition, therefore, none either.
It may be left to the denier of existence 'outside consciousness' to
tell us _where_ consciousness is. The inquiry may perhaps lead him to
the discovery that he, the professed foe of materialism, has been
limiting consciousness to the compass of the skull.

The ultimate claims of the theist to spiritual superiority and serenity
are oddly bracketed with the charges of arrogance and Epicureanism
constantly made by him against his antagonist. All alike are irrelevant
to the issue of truth; and all alike tell of other motives than those of
truth-seeking. Those other motives are substantially what our
theological ancestors called 'will-worship,' self-pleasing, the bias of
pre-supposition, the aversion to surrender. All theistic dialects alike
sing the song of self-esteem. The spiritist pronounces his gainsayer
'impe