1891.] [Bache. 



minds of my hearers, upon whose individual influence partially 

 rests the benefit which University-Extension teaching is capable 

 of effecting. The attempt to correct incidental error is strictly 

 correlated to endeavor to promulgate the truth, and if it be wise 

 to seek to sow intellectual seed broadcast, then it must also be 

 wise to select it carefully, and to eradicate the tares if any 

 should appear, especially if the soil be virgin, possessing little 

 previous vigorous growth to maintain itself against invasion of 

 injurious crops that haply may be introduced and appear as 

 fruitage of the untried field. 



I was present on the evening of the 16th of February last, at 

 Association Hall, in this city, at the lecture of Prof. Richard GL 

 Moulton, of Cambridge, England, on Dumas' Monte Cristo as a 

 companion study to Prospero, and there heard his attempt at 

 the demonstration of psychical analogies, similar to those which 

 his Syllabus for other occasions included, between the respec- 

 tively preternatural and supernatural elements in Monte Cristo 

 and The Tempest. Yet, although I am a monist, believing that 

 all existences, whether religious, philosophical, or scientific, form 

 one intimately connected and coherent whole in nature, the sole 

 barrier to the just and complete comprehension of which con- 

 dition lie.s in the feebleness of the human intellect, I also believe 

 that, perforce of that infirmity, we are constrained to view things 

 in the strictest categories, and that we judge of them only more 

 or less clearly by rigid comparison of their immanent likeness 

 and unlikeness ; and hence, although, as was said of Dean Swift 

 by one of his lady-loves, he could write well if he chose to about 

 a broom-stick, it is not, in my view, philosophically permissible 

 to any one to take a broom-stick for a rational flight, and from 

 its suggestion superpose a witch, and with her scale the empy- 

 rean, opening up to vision all earthly things below in a maze 

 with relation to themselves and the outspreading heavens. 



If by accident, and it was of the purest, for I was invited, 

 and did not go of my own motion to hear Mr. Moulton, some of 

 his teachings have become my text, so much the worse for him, 

 or mayhap for m^, if I should meet dissent from my proposi- 

 tions. But I make light of the possible consequences to myself, 

 in view of what I deem the justice of. my cause. In the interest 

 of that truth which is said to be mighty and always to prevail, 

 of which, however, I have my serious doubts, I speak frankly in 



