“That, too, as I take it, is a question of Dialectics, unless you choose to reduce the whole to a balance-of-probabilities argument-rather too narrow a basis for a World-faith to stand upon.  Try all ‘mythic’ theories, Straussite and others, by honest Dialectics.  Try your own thoughts and experiences, and the accredited thoughts and experiences of wise men, by the same method.  Mesmerism and ’The Development of Species’ may wait till they have settled themselves somewhat more into sciences; at present it does not much matter what agrees or disagrees with them.  But using this weapon fearlessly and honestly, you will, unless Socrates and Plato were fools, arrive at absolute eternal truths, which are equally true for all men, good or bad, conscious or unconscious; and I tell you-of course you need not believe me till you have made trial-that those truths will coincide with the plain honest meaning of the Catholic Creeds, as determined by the same method-the only one, indeed, by which they or anything else can be determined.”

“You forget Baconian induction, of which you are so fond.”

“And pray what are Dialectics, but strict Baconian induction applied to words, as the phenomena of mind, instead of to things, the phenomena of-”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you; or, rather, I will not.  I have my own opinion about what those trees and stones are; but it will require a few years’ more verification before I tell.”

“Really, you and your Dialectics seem in a hopeful and valiant state of mind.”

“Why not?  Can truth do anything but conquer?”

“Of course-assuming, as every one does, that the truth is with you.”

“My dear fellow, I have seldom met a man who could not be a far better dialectician than I shall ever be, if he would but use his Common Sense.”

“Common Sense?  That really sounds something like a bathos, after the great big Greek word which you have been propounding to me as the cure for all my doubts.”

“What?  Are you about to ‘gib’ after all, just as I was flattering myself that I had broken you in to go quietly in harness?”

“I am very much minded to do so.  The truth is, I cannot bring myself to believe that the universal panacea lies in an obscure and ancient scientific method.”

“Obscure and ancient?  Did I not just say that any man might be a dialectician?  Did Socrates ever appeal to any faculty but the Common Sense of man as man, which exists just as much in England now, I presume, as it did in Athens in his day?  Does he not, in pursuance of that method of his, draw his arguments and illustrations, to the horror of the big-worded Sophists, from dogs, kettles, fishwives, and what not which is vulgar and commonplace?  Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, make use of a single argument which does not lie, developed or undeveloped, in the Common Sense of every clown; in that human Reason of his, which is part of God’s