XVI 



TABLE-TALK 397 



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 1 



"The mass of the public will believe in ten years 

 precisely 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 attacking 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 and clarified by sound scientific 

 ideas. If I publish my criticism on Comte, I should 

 have to re-write it as a summary of philosophical 

 ideas from the earliest times. The thread of philo- 

 sophical development is not on the lines usually laid 

 down for it. It goes from Democritus and the rest 

 to the Epicureans, and then the Stoics, who tried to 



