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LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. 



He expressed his disgust with a certain member of the 

 Psychical Research Society for his attitude towards spirit- 

 ualism : " He doesn't believe in it, yet lends it the cover of 

 his name. He is one of the people who talk of the ' possi- 

 bility ' of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving 

 a thing as good as direct evidence in its favour." 



He thought it hard to be attacked for " the contempt of 

 the man of science ' when he was dragged into debate by 

 Mr. Andrew Lang's Common Sense and the Cock Lane Ghost, 

 he saying in a very polite letter : ' I am content to leave 

 Mr. Lang the Cock Lane Ghost if I may keep common 

 sense." " After all," he added, " when a man has been 

 through life and made his judgments, he must have come 

 to a decision that there are some subjects it is not worth 

 while going into." 



January 18. I referred to an article in the last Nine- 

 teenth Century, and he said : " As soon as I saw it, I wrote, 

 ' Knowles, my friend, you don't draw me this time. If a 

 man goes on attributing statements to me which I have 

 shown over and over again giving chapter and verse to 

 be the contrary of what I did say, it is no good saying any 



more.' 



But would not this course of silence leave the mass of 

 the British public believing the statements of the writer? 



The mass of the public will believe in ten years pre- 

 cisely the opposite of what they believe now. If a man is 

 not a fool, it does him no harm to be believed one. If he 

 really is a fool, it does matter. There never was book so 

 derided and scoffed at as my first book, Man's Place in 

 Nature, but it was true, and I don't know I was any the 

 worse for the ridicule. 



' People call me fond of controversy, but, as a fact, for 

 the last twenty years at all events, I have never entered upon 

 a controversy without some further purpose in view. As to 

 Gladstone and his Impregnable Rock, it wasn't worth attack- 

 ing them for themselves ; but it was most important at that 

 moment to shake him in the minds of sensible men. 



The movement of modern philosophy is back towards 

 the position of the old Ionian philosophers, but strengthened 



