hich sound philosophy and Christian faith have developed,
is still strong in the minds and deeper conscience of the
English-speaking races, and that were they to present materialism in all
its loathsome nudity to the public gaze, they would be hissed off the
stage. And so they dress it up in the clothes of the old religion just
for the present, with many a quiet wink between themselves at the
expense of the "semi-scientific" reader.

We have already adverted to Mr. Laing's utter incapacity for anything
like philosophy, except so far as that term can be applied to a power of
raking together, selecting, and piling up into "a popular shape" the
scraps of information which favour the view whose correctness he was
convinced of ere he began. A few further remarks may justify this
somewhat severe estimate. After stating that in the solution of life and
soul problems, science stops short at germs and nucleated cells, he
proceeds with the usual tirade against metaphysics: "Take Descartes'
fundamental axiom: _Cogito ergo sum_.... Is it really an axiom?... If
the fact that I am conscious of thinking proves the fact that I exist,
is the converse true that whatever does not think does not exist?...
Does a child only begin to exist when it begins to think? If _Cogito
ergo sum_ is an institution to which we can trust, why is not _Non
cogito ergo non sum?_" [34] Here is a man posing before the gaping
millions as a philosopher and a severe logician, who thinks that the
proposition, "every cow is a quadruped," is disproved by the evident
falsehood of, "what is not a cow is not a quadruped," which he calls
"the converse." He sums up magnificently by saying: "These are questions
to which no metaphysical system that I have ever seen, can return the
semblance of an answer;" giving the impression of a life devoted to a
deep and exhaustive study of all schools of philosophy. Mr. Laing here
surely is addressing his "younger readers."

He tells us elsewhere [35] that, "when analyzed by science, spiritualism
leads straight to materialism;" free-will "can be annihilated by the
simple mechanical expedient of looking at a black wafer stuck on a white
wall;" that if "Smith falls into a trance and believes himself to be
Jones, he really is Jones, and Smith has become a stranger to him while
the trance lasts.... I often ask myself the question, If he died during
one of these trances, which would he be, Smith or Jones? and I confess
it takes some one w