154 Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. [ix. 



Our author then declares that the truths which we 

 possess relating to morality have not changed for 

 thousands of years. No, they have not. Neither 

 have " intellectual truths." A truth, once established, 

 never changes, cannot change, otherwise it would be 

 no truth, but a falsehood. Take, for example, the 

 law of gravitation: "All bodies in the universe 

 attract each other with forces directly proportional to 

 their masses, and inversely proportional to the squares 

 of their distances apart." We have had no occasion 

 to alter this statement since the time of Newton. It 

 is a demonstrated truth, and will never be susceptible 

 of the slightest change. The same is the case with 

 the truth, " It is wrong to kill." Once recognised, 

 this truth can experience no change, for the very 

 reason that it is a truth, and not a falsehood. In a 

 word, when a proposition has been once shown to be 

 true it will for ever remain so, whether it relates to 

 our moral obligations, or to anything else whatever. 

 There is no ground for Mr. Buckle's distinction. 



Nor would our author be one whit the more justi- 

 fied in saying, as he might say, that the interpretation 

 put upon " moral truths" is unchanging as compared 

 with that put upon " intellectual truths." On the 

 contrary, it appears to us that the reverse is the case. 

 When a truth, relating to some of the simpler subjects 



