respect it stands alone among newspaper columns.
I mean only that I have found that my meaning was better expressed
by some practical parable out of daily life than by any other method;
therefore I propose to narrate the incident of the extraordinary cabman,
which occurred to me only three days ago, and which, slight as it
apparently is, aroused in me a moment of genuine emotion bordering upon
despair.

On the day that I met the strange cabman I had been lunching in a little
restaurant in Soho in company with three or four of my best friends. My
best friends are all either bottomless sceptics or quite uncontrollable
believers, so our discussion at luncheon turned upon the most ultimate
and terrible ideas. And the whole argument worked out ultimately to
this: that the question is whether a man can be certain of anything
at all. I think he can be certain, for if (as I said to my friend,
furiously brandishing an empty bottle) it is impossible intellectually
to entertain certainty, what is this certainty which it is impossible
to entertain? If I have never experienced such a thing as certainty I
cannot even say that a thing is not certain. Similarly, if I have never
experienced such a thing as green I cannot even say that my nose is not
green. It may be as green as possible for all I know, if I have really
no experience of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook the
room; because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing. And
the difference between us was very deep, because it was a difference as
to the object of the whole thing called broad-mindedness or the opening
of the intellect. For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the
sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening
infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened
my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing
it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly
silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.

.....

Now when this argument was over, or at least when it was cut short (for
it will never be over), I went away with one of my companions, who in
the confusion and comparative insanity of a General Election had somehow
become a member of Parliament, and I drove with him in a cab from the
corner of Leicester-square to the members' entrance of the House of
Commons, where the police received me with a quite unusual tolerance.