14 



ANNUAL MEETING. 



The victim of delirium tremens sees frogs and toads and 

 creepin-^ things innumerable. Are there any there? 



A man comes tn the margin of a river and in the mist he 

 thinks lie sees a bridge. 



'J'o adopt tlie patois of fraud against which I am protesting, 

 he plants, or strives to plant, his objective legs on his subjec- 

 tive bridge. He may well ask in the language of some of 

 the boj^s' puzzles — where is the bridge? 



Or take the still more homely illustration, you give a boy 

 a sum to do — he does it wrong and, dropping philosophic 

 language, he makes a blunder in his arithmetic. Suppose he 

 answers his indignant tutor with the excuse that subjectively 

 the wrong addition was to his mental conception subjectively 

 true, vrould not the objective birch rod suggest totally difier- 

 ent subjective conceptions ? Now let us weigh some of our 

 words. 



That there are degrees of proof from demonstration to a 

 slight balance of probability will not justify the phrase 

 proved, and one is perpetually to be on guard against the 

 allegation that a thing is proved because there is some 

 evidence in favour of it. I will not proceed, though I 

 might, with a whole catalogue of words which the modern 

 sophist uses either in a double sense or with a meaning 

 which involves as an assumption the thing to be proved. 



Among many advantages, and they are many, which have 

 been introduced by the facility with which printed matter 

 may be circulated there is the corresponding disadvantage 

 that error is circulated with as much facility as truth, and 

 error is ignorance not knowledge. The great Roman poet 

 denounced with bitter indignation the poetasters of his time 

 who were degrading the literature of his country, and in 

 our time we have the printing press which Juvenal had not. 



Each pei-iod has of course its popular madness or popular 

 folly, and at one time the torrent of trash which each age 

 in turn produces in full measure is turned in ditferent 

 directions. Delia Crusca poetry, however, has vanished, but 

 Lamarck-ms Darwin-^^^^5 abound in our time ; public taste 

 has taken a form which induces each publication to contri- 

 bute its own little addition to the literature of unbelief, and if 

 we hear nothing of the Grove of Mars or Vulcan's Cave we 

 have " evolution " enough to swallow up all the tragedies 

 and elegies which disturbed the Roman sage. 



But side by side all this, with an incongruity which is not 

 without example in the tide of human error, we have seen 



