v.] "Modern Symposium." 6i 



would not be thrown away. It is true that something 

 has already been said upon this point — enough, one 

 would think, to obviate the necessity of turning 

 back to slay the resuscitated ghosts of thrice- 

 slaughtered misconceptions. On the character of 

 materiahsm as a philosophical hypothesis, Mr. Spencer 

 has been tolerably explicit. Professor Huxley has 

 summed up the case with his customary felicity, at 

 the close of that famous Edinburgh lecture which 

 everybody is supposed to have read.-*- In my work 

 on Cosmic Philosophy, I have devoted a very plain- 

 spoken chapter to the subject. Nevertheless, as Mr. 

 Freeman says, it is not a bad plan, when you have 

 onc^ got hold of a truth, to keep hammering it into 

 people's heads on all occasions, even at the risk of 

 being voted a tedious bore or a victim of crotchets. 

 We live in a hurried and not over-intelligent world, 

 wherein the wariest of us do not always pay due heed 

 to what we are told, and the keenest do not always 

 divine its sense ; but, after we have heard it repeated 

 fifty times that Alfred was an Englishman, and 

 Charles the Great was not a Frenchman, we may 

 perhaps succeed in waking up to the historical 

 import of such statements. In this pithy though 



^ "The Physical Basis of Life" — Lay Sermons, p. 1 60. 



