ADDRESS BY LOU I) HALSBURY^ 1>.C. 



13 



of such a method that no refiig-e can be found for confused 

 thought, in words of learned length or what, perhaps, I may 

 call the slang of the Schools. The critic is present and 

 ready for the fray, and hesitates not to probe the dark 

 speech to the bottom, and at all events, to get at what is 

 intended to be conveyed by Avords however long and by 

 circumlocution however intricate. 



Such a word, for instance, as supernatural has not been 

 suffered to escape searching scrutiny, and it has been justly 

 asked how, until Nature has been forced to disclose all that 

 is comprehended in the natural world, the word supernatural 

 can have any real meaning. 



That words are the counters of wise men and the money 

 of fools is a terse if not a very accurate apothegm, 

 representing, however, a very important truth, I mean not 

 very accurate in its assumed antithesis, since it treats money 

 as of a value intrinsically apart from what it represents, but 

 adopting for the sake of the truth involved the economic 

 error of the illustration, it will lead one to weigh the words 

 which are in vogue in the philosophical discussions of our 

 time and see whether we have a new thing or a new word. 



Now it has lately become the fashion to deal with every 

 subject and with every aspect of every subject as though 

 nothing were absolutely true or absolutely false, a system 

 whereby definite and accurate thought is repudiated, and 

 every error, however monstrous, every dreamy imagination 

 treated not as a blunder, but in the pseudo-philosophic slang 

 suhjectively true. It is said that mental phenomena are not 

 the less real because the subject of the conceptions have no 

 real representatives in the external world, and this is true if 

 it means no more than that the blunderer believes in his 

 blunder. 



As long as such words as subjective and objective are 

 recognised as the x and y of an algebraic problem, and to 

 have no meaning in themselves, they may be accepted as 

 convenient words for the purpose for which the calculator 

 designs them, but unfortunately their use has become such 

 as to mislead. 



There is such a thing as truth and falsehood, irrespective 

 of what people think or say. 



There are diseases which create delusions, delusions 

 let us say about colour and the victim of a malady sees 

 everything yellow. Are the things yellow because he sees 

 them thus? 



