rmances?

POSITIVIST: I am by Rousseau out of Catholicism, with a strain of the
Evolution blood.

PURCHASER: What do you believe in?

POSITIVIST: In Man, with a large M.

PURCHASER: Not in individual Man?

POSITIVIST: By no means; not even always in Mr. Gladstone. All men, all
Churches, all parties, all philosophies, and even the other sect of our
own Church, are perpetually in the wrong. Buy me, and listen to me, and
you will ahvays be in the right.

PURCHASER: And, after this life, what have you to offer me?

POSITIVIST: A distinguished position in the Choir Invisible: but not, of
course, conscious immortality.

PURCHASER: Take him away, and put up another lot.

Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his
notions, and the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion and
Evolution, and the Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a sort of
a something, might all be offered with their divers wares; and cheaply
enough, Lucian, you would value them in this auction of Sects. 'There is
but one way to Corinth,' as of old; but which that way may be, oh master
of Hermotimus, we know no more than he did of old; and still we find, of
all philosophies, that the Stoic route is most to be recommended. But
we have our Cyrenaics too, though they are no longer 'clothed in
purple, and crowned with flowers, and fond of drink and of female
flute-players.' Ah, here too, you might laugh, and fail to see where the
Pleasure lies, when the Cyrenaics are no 'judges of cakes' (nor of
ale, for that matter), and are strangers in the Courts of Princes. 'To
despise all things, to make use of all things, in all things to follow
pleasure only:' that is not the manner of the new, if it were the secret
of the older Hedonism.

Then, turning from the philosophers to the seekers after a sign, what
change, Lucian, would you find in them and their ways? None; they are
quite unaltered. Still our Perigrinus, and our Perigrina too, come to
us from the East, or, if from the West, they take India on their
way--India, that secular home of drivelling creeds, and of religion in
its sacerdotage. Still they prattle of Brahmins and Buddhism; though,
unlike Peregrinus, they do not publicly burn themselves on pyres, at
Epsom Downs, after the Derby. We are not so fortunate in the demise of
our Theosophists; and our police, less wise than the Hellenodicae, would
probably not permit the Immolation of the Quack. Like your Alexander,
the