with as many names as atoms and possible combinations and permutations of atoms.  The lines we draw, the moments we choose for cutting this or that off at this or that place, and thenceforth the dubbing it by another name, are as arbitrary as the moments chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter for leaving off beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ready kind.

What else, however, can we do?  We can only escape the Scylla of calling everything by one name, and recognising no individual existences of any kind, by falling into the Charybdis of having a name for everything, or by some piece of intellectual sharp practice like that of the shrewd but unprincipled Ulysses.  If we were consistent honourable gentlemen, into Charybdis or on to Scylla we should go like lambs; every subterfuge by the help of which we escape our difficulty is but an arbitrary high-handed act of classification that turns a deaf ear to everything not robust enough to hold its own; nevertheless even the most scrupulous of philosophers pockets his consistency at a pinch, and refuses to let the native hue of resolution be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, nor yet fobbed by the rusty curb of logic.  He is right, for assuredly the poor intellectual abuses of the time want countenancing now as much as ever, but so far as he countenances them, he should bear in mind that he is returning to the ground of common sense, and should not therefore hold himself too stiffly in the matter of logic.

As with life and death so with design and absence of design or luck.  So also with union and disunion.  There is never either absolute design rigorously pervading every detail, nor yet absolute absence of design pervading any detail rigorously, so, as between substances, there is neither absolute union and homogeneity, not absolute disunion and heterogeneity; there is always a little place left for repentance; that is to say, in theory we should admit that both design and chance, however well defined, each have an aroma, as it were, of the other.  Who can think of a case in which his own design—­about which he should know more than any other, and from which, indeed, all his ideas of design are derived—­was so complete that there was no chance in any part of it?  Who, again, can bring forward a case even of the purest chance or good luck into which no element of design had entered directly or indirectly at any juncture?  This, nevertheless, does not involve our being unable ever to ascribe a result baldly either to luck or cunning.  In some cases a decided preponderance of the action, whether seen as a whole or looked at in detail, is recognised at once as due to design, purpose, forethought, skill, and effort, and then we properly disregard the undesigned element; in others the details cannot without violence be connected with design, however much the position which rendered the main action possible may involve design—­as,