134 SCIENCE AND MORALS m 



that conviction. In following these lines of specu 

 lation I am reminded of the quarter-deck walks of 

 my youth. In taking that form of exercise you 

 may perambulate through all points of the com 

 pass with perfect safety, so long as you keep within 

 certain limits : forget those limits, in your ardour, 

 and mere smothering and spluttering, if not worse, 

 await you. I stick by the deck and throw a life 

 buoy now and then to the struggling folk who 

 have gone overboard ; and all I get for my 

 humanity is the abuse of all whenever they leave 

 off abusing one another. 



Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of 

 the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, 

 is for a man to presume to go about unlabelled. 

 The world regards such a person as the police do 

 an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control. I 

 could find no label that would suit me, so, in my 

 desire to range myself and be respectable, I in 

 vented one ; and, as the chief thing I was sure of 

 was that I did not know a great many things that 

 the ists and the ites about me professed to be 

 familiar with, I called myself an Agnostic. Surely 

 no denomination could be more modest or more 

 appropriate ; and I cannot imagine why I should 

 be every now and then haled out of my refuge 

 and declared sometimes to be a Materialist, some 

 times an Atheist, sometimes a Positivist ; and 

 sometimes, alas and alack, a cowardly or reaction 

 ary Obscurantist. 



