ions lies in
their oversight of the considerations which lead to
Idealism. If many of them regarded the material world as a
negation, it was an active negation; not zero, but a minus
quantity.

[18] At any rate a catastrophe greater than the flood,
which, as I observe with interest, is as calmly assumed by
the preacher to be an historical event as if science had
never had a word to say on that subject!

[19] "Les formes des anciens ou Entelechies ne sont autre
chose que les forces" (Leibnitz, _Lettre au Pere Bouvet_,
1697).

III: SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE

[1887]

In the opening sentences of a contribution to the last number of this
Review,[20] the Duke of Argyll has favoured me with a lecture on the
proprieties of controversy, to which I should be disposed to listen
with more docility if his Grace's precepts appeared to me to be based
upon rational principles, or if his example were more exemplary.

With respect to the latter point, the Duke has thought fit to entitle
his article "Professor Huxley on Canon Liddon," and thus forces into
prominence an element of personality, which those who read the paper
which is the object of the Duke's animadversions will observe I have
endeavoured, most carefully, to avoid. My criticisms dealt with a
report of a sermon, published in a newspaper, and thereby addressed to
all the world. Whether that sermon was preached by A or B was not a
matter of the smallest consequence; and I went out of my way to
absolve the learned divine to whom the discourse was attributed from
the responsibility for statements which, for anything I knew to the
contrary, might contain imperfect, or inaccurate, representations of
his views. The assertion that I had the wish, or was beset, by any
"temptation to attack" Canon Liddon is simply contrary to fact.

But suppose that if, instead of sedulously avoiding even the
appearance of such attack, I had thought fit to take a different
course; suppose that, after satisfying myself that the eminent
clergyman whose name is paraded by the Duke of Argyll had really
uttered the words attributed to him from the pulpit of St. Paul's,
what right would any one have to find fault with my action on grounds
either of justice, expediency, or good taste?

Establishment has its duties as well as its rights. The clergy of a
State Church enjoy many advantages over