hough
as specialists they might be probably ignorant. The difference was
rather, perhaps, a difference of dialect than of substance. Their
weapons were old-fashioned; but the main lines of attack and defence
were the same.

Another criticism, however, was obvious, and is, I think, sufficiently
indicated in Mr. Hutton's imaginary conversation. The so-called
discussions were necessarily in the main a series of assertions. Each
disputant simply translated the admitted facts into his own language.
The argument came to saying, I say ditto to Hume, or to Comte, or to
Thomas Aquinas. After a brief encounter, one man declared that he
believed in God, and his opponent replied, I don't. It was impossible
really to get further. It was not a difference between two advocates
agreed upon first principles and disputing only some minor corollary,
but a manifestation of different modes of thought, and of diverging
conceptions of the world and of life, which had become thoroughly
imbedded in the very texture of the speaker's mind. When it is a
question of principles, which have been the battle-ground of
generations; when every argument that can be used has been worked out by
the subtlest thinkers of all times, a dispute can really come to nothing
but saying, I am of this or that turn of mind. The real discussion of
such questions is carried on by a dialectical process which lasts
through many generations, and is but little affected by any particular
champion. Thus the general effect necessarily was as of men each
securely intrenched in his own fastness, and, though they might make
sallies for a little engagement in the open, each could retreat to a
position of impregnable security, which could be assaulted only by long
siege operations of secular duration.

It was, I fancy, a gradual perception of these difficulties which led
to the decay of the Society. Meanwhile there were many pleasant
meetings, and, if the discussions came to be little more than a mutual
exhibition to each other of the various persons concerned, I hope and
believe that each tended to the conviction that his antagonist had
neither horns nor hoofs. The discussions, moreover, produced a
considerable crop of Magazine articles; and helped to spread the
impression that certain very important problems were being debated, upon
the decision of which immense practical consequences might depend. It
might be curious to inquire how far the real interest in these arguments
exte