For, indeed, the weakness of this worship of mere natural life (which is a common enough creed to-day) is that it ignores the paradox of courage and fails in its own aim.  As a matter of fact, no men would be killed quicker than the Methuselahites.  The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.  And in the very case I have quoted we may see an example of how little the theory of Methuselahism really inspires our best life.  For there is one riddle in that case which cannot easily be cleared up.  If it was the man’s religion to live as long as he could, why on earth was he enlisting as a soldier?

SPIRITUALISM.

I Have received a letter from a gentleman who is very indignant at what he considers my flippancy in disregarding or degrading Spiritualism.  I thought I was defending Spiritualism; but I am rather used to being accused of mocking the thing that I set out to justify.  My fate in most controversies is rather pathetic.  It is an almost invariable rule that the man with whom I don’t agree thinks I am making a fool of myself, and the man with whom I do agree thinks I am making a fool of him.  There seems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating a subject properly if you eulogise it with fantastic terms or defend it by grotesque examples.  Yet a truth is equally solemn whatever figure or example its exponent adopts.  It is an equally awful truth that four and four make eight, whether you reckon the thing out in eight onions or eight angels, or eight bricks or eight bishops, or eight minor poets or eight pigs.  Similarly, if it be true that God made all things, that grave fact can be asserted by pointing at a star or by waving an umbrella.  But the case is stronger than this.  There is a distinct philosophical advantage in using grotesque terms in a serious discussion.

I think seriously, on the whole, that the more serious is the discussion the more grotesque should be the terms.  For this, as I say, there is an evident reason.  For a subject is really solemn and important in so far as it applies to the whole cosmos, or to some great spheres and cycles of experience at least.  So far as a thing is universal it is serious.  And so far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things.  If you take a small thing, it may be entirely serious:  Napoleon, for instance, was a small thing, and he was serious:  the same applies to microbes.  If you isolate a thing, you may get the pure essence of gravity.  But if you take a large thing (such as the Solar System) it must be comic, at least in parts.  The germs are serious, because they kill you.  But the stars are funny, because they give birth to life, and life gives birth to fun.  If you have, let us say, a theory about man, and if you can only prove it by talking about Plato and George Washington, your theory may be a quite frivolous thing.  But if you can prove it