33 o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



success in his shop, has come to consider that he is always sure 

 to be right in everything. And we know this type in the 

 classical British doctrinaire with a decided manner, a clean- 

 shaved lip, and a fringe of beard under his chin. Often again 

 the pacifist is a rather stout but already rather bald-headed 

 youth, who makes himself felt at discussions after tea by the 

 weight of statistics with which no one else is acquainted. Now 

 all these men are Men of Principle. 



The Man of Principle begins to exist as soon as he reaches 

 the years of indiscretion. Miserable mediocrities like ourselves, 

 when we arrive at, say, twenty years, admit to ourselves that we 

 have little learning, no experience, and a very ordinary brain, 

 and that it would be altogether wiser in us not to form decided 

 opinions upon everything until we are twenty-five or thirty 

 years older. But this is just where the Man of Principle differs : 

 for no sooner has he left school than he has already made up his 

 mind about everything, and the whole of his subsequent life is 

 devoted to the purpose of proving that he was right before he 

 was of age. With him theories were not made to fit facts, but 

 facts, theories ; and when they will not fit, he claims an a priori 

 mission. It is a mere accident whether he becomes an aggressive 

 militarist or an abject pacifist. If, when a boy, he had succeeded 

 in thumping another boy he would probably become the former; 

 but if, on the other hand, it was he had been thumped, he would 

 become the latter. Or he will decide according to his birth — 

 to be a thumper if he is a king, and to be a thumped if he is not. 

 In both cases the principles have not been arrived at by any 

 careful analysis of all possible facts achieved by an open mind 

 trained in the ways of correct reasoning, but by an instantaneous 

 appreciation of the truth instilled into a superior brain by a 

 direct flash of light from above. So given, the inspiration 

 cannot be modified, and the whole universe is centred round the 

 man of principle's principal principle. He is a Tory, or a 

 Liberal, or a Radical ; he is an aggressive militarist, or an abject 

 pacifist, or an antivivisector, or an antivaccinator, or a woman's- 

 rights man, or an everybody's-rights man, or a socialist, or a 

 nihilist, or a total-prohibitionist, or an anticonscriptionist, or 

 a misogamist, or any other kind of universal shrieker. But, 

 strange to say, he often succeeds by the sheer weight of his 

 stupidity in making his way among his more rational fellows, 

 and has even been known to enter Parliament ! For the point 



