“The two sentences in small capitals are not found in the new edition of the ‘Phases.’ They are struck out.  It is no doubt the right of an author to erase in a new edition any expressions he pleases; but when he is about to charge another with having grossly garbled and stealthily misrepresented him, it is as well to let the world know what he has erased and why.  He says that my representation of his sentiments is the most direct and intense reverse of all that he has most elaborately and carefully written.  It certainly is not the intense reverse of all that he has most elaborately and carefully scratched out.”

I exhibit here the writer’s own italics.

By this attack on my good faith, and by pretending that my withdrawal of the passage is of serious importance, he distracts the reader’s attention from the argument there in hand (p. 79), which is, not what are my sentiments and judgements, but whether he had a right to dissolve and distort my chain of reasoning (see I. above) while affecting to quote me, and pretending that I gave nothing but assertion.  As regards my “elaborately and carefully scratching out,” this was done; 1.  Because the passage seemed to me superfluous; 2.  Because I had pressed the topic elsewhere; 3.  Because I was going to enlarge on it in my reply to him, p. 199 of my second edition.[12] When the real place comes where my critic is to deal with the substance of the passage (p. 94 of “Defence"), the reader has seen how he mutilates it.

The other passage of mine which he has adduced, employs the word reveals, in a sense analogous to that of revelation, in avowed relation to things moral and spiritual, which would have been seen, had not my critic reversed the order of my sentences; which he does again in p. 78 of the “Defence,” after my protest against his doing so in the “Eclipse.”  I wrote:  (Soul, p. 59) “Christianity itself has thus practically confessed, what is theoretically clear, that an authoritative external revelation of moral and spiritual truth is essentially impossible to man.  What God reveals to us, he reveals within, through the medium of our moral and spiritual senses.”  The words, “What God reveals,” seen in the light of the preceding sentence, means:  “That portion of moral and spiritual truth which God reveals.”  This cannot be discovered in the isolated quotation; and as, both in p. 78 and in p. 95, he chooses to quote my word What in italics, his reader is led on to interpret me as saying “every thing whatsoever which we know of God, we learn from within;” a statement which is not mine.