d it
seemed to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir,
there is no such thing as the whole truth!" Indeed, there is nothing so
evident in life as that there are two sides to a question. History is
one long illustration. The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in
cudgelling it into our backward intelligences. We never pause for a
moment's consideration, but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways
humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into
our ears that this or that question has only one possible solution; and
your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while
and shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an army of
quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other
side and demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting
everybody exactly right in his "Institutes," and hot-headed Knox is
thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side
in his library in Perigord, and predicting that they will find as much
to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found already in the Church.
Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is
nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both
are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to
differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a
philosopher must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I
fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before
us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there
are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because,
like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to
differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed
song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical
voices.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] "Lothair."

III

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS

"BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle."

"JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;
but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all
entertain one another."

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of _lese_-respectability, to enter on some luc