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. 



