for all
things as they are, even for all things as they seem. Did you not
remark the audacious contempt for all ages but 'our glorious
nineteenth century,' and the still deeper contempt for all in the
said glorious time who dared to believe that there was any
ascertained truth independent of the private fancy and opinion of-
for I am afraid it came to that-him, Professor Windrush, and his
circle of elect souls? 'You may believe nothing if you like, and
welcome; but if you do take to that unnecessary act, you are a fool
if you believe anything but what I believe-though I do not choose to
state what that is.' Is not that, now, a pretty fair formulisation
of his doctrine?"

"But, my dear raver," said Templeton, laughing, "the man believed at
least in physical science. I am sure we heard enough about its
triumphs."

"It may be so. But to me his very 'spiritualism' seemed more
materialistic than his physics. His notion seemed to be, though
heaven forbid that I should say that he ever put it formally before
himself-"

"Or anything else," said Templeton, sotto voce.

"-that it is the spiritual world which is governed by physical laws,
and the physical by spiritual ones; that while men and women are
merely the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, and attractions
and repulsions, it is the trees, and stones, and gases, who have the
wills and the energies, and the faiths and the virtues and the
personalities."

"You are caricaturing."

"How so? How can I judge otherwise, when I hear a man talking, as
he did, of God in terms which, every one of them involved what we
call the essential properties of matter-space, time, passibility,
motion; setting forth phrenology and mesmerism as the great organs
of education, even of the regeneration of mankind; apologising for
the earlier ravings of the Poughkeepsie seer, and considering his
later eclectico-pantheist farragos as great utterances: while,
whenever he talked of Nature, he showed the most credulous craving
after everything which we, the countrymen of Bacon, have been taught
to consider unscientific-Homoeopathy, Electro-biology, Loves of the
Plants a la Darwin, Vestiges of Creation, Vegetarianisms,
Teetotalisms-never mind what, provided it was unaccredited or
condemned by regularly educated men of science?"

"But you don't mean to assert that there is nothing in any of these
theories?"

"Of course not. I can no more prove a universal negative about them
than