ne who made more puns, and spat more blood,
than any other man of his time."

Buckle well says, in his fine vindication of Voltaire, that he "used
ridicule, not as the test of truth, but as the scourge of folly." And he
adds--

"His irony, his wit, his pungent and telling sarcasms, produced more
effect than the gravest arguments could have done; and there can be no
doubt that he was fully justified in using those great resources
with which nature had endowed him, since by their aid he advanced the
interests of truth, and relieved men from some of their most inveterate
prejudices."

Victor Hugo puts it much better in his grandiose way, when he says of
Voltaire that "he was irony incarnate for the salvation of mankind."

Voltaire's opponents, as Buckle points out, had a foolish reverence for
antiquity, and they were impervious to reason. To compare great things
with small, our opponents are of the same character. Grave argument
is lost upon them; it runs off them like water from a duck. When we
approach the mysteries of their faith in a spirit of reverence, we
yield them half the battle. We must concede them nothing. What they call
reverence is only conventional prejudice. It must be stripped away from
the subject, and if argument will not remove the veil, ridicule will.
Away with the insane notion that absurdity is reverend because it is
ancient! If it is thousands of years old, treat it exactly as if it were
told the first time to-day. Science recognises nothing in space and time
to invalidate the laws of nature. They prevailed in the past as well as
in the present, in Jerusalem as well as in London. That is how Science
regards everything; and at bottom Science and common-sense are one and
the same.

Professor Huxley, in his admirable little book on Hume, after pointing
out the improbability of centaurs, says that judged by the canons of
science all "miracles" are centaurs. He also considers what would happen
if he were told by the greatest anatomist of the age that he had seen a
centaur. He admits that the weight of such authority would stagger him,
but it would scarcely make him believe. "I could get no further," says
Huxley, "than a suspension of judgment."

Now I venture to say that if Johannes Mueller had told Huxley any such
thing, he would have at once concluded that the great anatomist was
joking or suffering from hallucination. As a matter of fact trained
investigators do not see these incredible monstro