450 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap. 



He expressed his disgust with a certain member of the 

 Psychical Research Society for his attitude towards spirit- 

 ualism : " He doesn't believe in it, yet lends it the cover of 

 his name. He is one of the people who talk of the ' possi- 

 bility ' of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving 

 a thing as good as direct evidence in its favour." 



He thought it hard to be attacked for " the contempt of 

 the man of science " when he was dragged into debate by 

 Mr. Andrew Lang's Common Sense and the Cock Lane Ghost, 

 he saying in a very polite letter : " I am content to leave 

 Mr. Lang the Cock Lane Ghost if I may keep common 

 sense." " After all," he added, " when a man has been 

 through life and made his judgments, he must have come 

 to a decision that there are some subjects it is not worth 

 while going into." 



January 18. — I referred to an article in the last Nine- 

 teenth Century, and he said : — " As soon as I saw it, I wrote, 

 ' Knowles, my friend, you don't draw me 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? 



" The mass of the public will believe in ten years pre- 

 cisely 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 attack- 

 ing 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 



