The Way of Escape 153 
rather than resemblances, we can draw distinctions, and 
give reasons for subdividing and subdividing, till, unless we 
violate what we choose to call our consistency somewhere, 
we shall find ourselves with as many names as atoms and 
possible combinations and permutations of atoms. The 
lines we draw, the moments we choose for cutting this or 
that off at this or that place, and thenceforth the dubbing 
it by another name, are as arbitrary as the moments 
chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter for. leaving off 
beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an 
approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ready 
kind. 
What else, however, can we do? We can only escape 
the Scylla of calling everything by one name, and recog- 
nising no individual existences of any kind, by falling into 
the Charybdis of having a name for everything, or by some 
piece of intellectual sharp practice like that of the shrewd 
but unprincipled Ulysses. If we were consistent honourable 
gentlemen, into Charybdis or on to Scylla we should go like 
lambs ; every subterfuge by the help of which we escape 
our difficulty is but an arbitrary high-handed act of classifi- 
cation that turns a deaf ear to everything not robust 
enough to hold its own; nevertheless even the most 
scrupulous of philosophers pockets his consistency at a 
pinch, and refuses to let the native hue of resolution be 
sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, nor yet fobbed 
by the rusty curb of logic. He is right, for assuredly the 
poor intellectual abuses of the time want countenancing 
now as much as ever, but so far as he countenances them, 
he should bear in mind that he is returning to the ground 
of common sense, and should not therefore hold himself 
too stiffly in the matter of logic. 
As with life and death so with design and absence of 
design or luck. So also with union and disunion. There 
is never either absolute design rigorously pervading every 
detail, nor yet absolute absence of design pervading any 
