image in him, and in every man?  And has not my complaint against Mr. Windrush’s school been, that they will not do this; that they will not accept the ground which is common to men as men, but disregard that part of the ‘Vox Populi’ which is truly ‘Vox Dei,’ for that which is ’Vox Diaboli’-for private sentiments, fancies, and aspirations; and so casting away the common sense of mankind, build up each man, on the pin’s point of his own private judgment, his own inverted pyramid?”

“But are you not asking me to do just the same, when you propose to me to start as a Scientific Dialectician?”

“Why, what are Dialectics, or any other scientific method, but conscious common sense?  And what is common sense, but unconscious scientific method?  Every man is a dialectician, be he scholar or boor, in as far as he tries to use no words which he does not understand, and to sift his own thoughts, and his expression of them, by that Reason which is at once common to men, and independent of them.”

“As M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without knowing it.  Well-I prefer the unconscious method.  I have as little faith as Mr. Carlyle would have in saying:  ’Go to, let us make’-an induction about words, or anything else.  It seems to me no very hopeful method of finding out facts as they are.”

“Certainly; provided you mean any particular induction, and not a general inductive and severely-inquiring habit of mind; that very ‘Go to’ being a fair sign that you have settled beforehand what the induction shall be; in plain English, that you have come to your conclusion already, and are now looking about for facts to prove it.  But is it any wiser to say:  ’Go to, I will be conscious of being unconscious of being conscious of my own forms of thought’?  For that is what you do say, when, having read Plato, and knowing his method, and its coincidence with Common Sense, you determine to ignore it on common-sense questions.”

“But why not ignore it, if mother-wit does as well?”

“Because you cannot ignore it.  You have learnt it more or less, and cannot forget it, try as you will, and must either follow it, or break it and talk nonsense.  And moreover, you ought not to ignore it.  For it seems to me, that you were sent to Cambridge by One greater than, your parents, in order that you might learn it, and bring it home hither for the use of the M. Jourdains round you here, who have no doubt been talking prose all their life, but may have been also talking it very badly.”

“You speak riddles.”

“My dear fellow, may not a man employ Reason, or any other common human faculty, all his life, and yet employ them very clumsily and defectively?”

“I should say so, from the gross amount of human unwisdom.”

“And that, in the case of uneducated persons, happens because they are not conscious of those faculties, or of their right laws, but use them blindly and capriciously, by fits and starts, talking sense on one point and nonsense on another?”