ht to show that
Jowett's principles, if carried far enough, ended in absurdity, so did I
seek to show that Ruskin's principles, despite their superficial
absurdities, ended, if carried far enough, in the nearest approach to
truth which under modern conditions of thought and knowledge is
possible. In my effort to give point to what were really my own
underlying convictions, I wrote _The New Republic_ six or seven times
over, and in doing so it became clearer and clearer to me what my own
convictions were. They ended in an application of the method of a
_reductio ad absurdum_ to everything; and this fact I finally indicated
in the words of a Greek epigram which I placed as a motto on the
title-page: "All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for all
the things that are arise out of the unreasonable."

Such seemed to me the upshot of all the intellectual and moral teaching
of Oxford, of the faintly hinted liberalism of Mr. Philpot's teachings
which had preceded them, and of my own enlarging experiences of male and
female society. That such a conclusion was satisfactory I did not for a
moment feel, but here was the very reason which urged me on to elaborate
it. The mood which expresses itself in a sense that life is merely
ridiculous was, so my consciousness protested, nothing more and nothing
better than a disease, and my hope was that I should get rid of it by
expressing it once for all as pungently and as completely as I could,
after which I would address myself to the project of finding a
foundation for some positive philosophy of life which should indeed be
fortified by reason, but against which reason should not prevail. When,
however, _The New Republic_ had been completed and given to the world, I
felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had
not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by
another--_The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island_, a
short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's _Candide_. This is a
story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a
demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked
on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading
superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the
sublime service of Humanity--of that "Grand Etre," so he says to her,
"which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress
to consist of you a