ry of health showing
themselves smaller than the small of other pursuits. And how is this?
First, because each profession is entered upon a mere working smack of its
knowledge, without any depth of education, general or professional. Not
that this is the whole explanation, nor in itself objectionable: the great
mass of the world must be tended, soul and body, by those who are neither
Hookers[345] nor Harveys[346]: let such persons not venture _ultra
crepidam_, and they are useful and respectable. But, secondly, there is a
vast upheaving of thought from the depths of commonplace learning. I am a
clergyman! Sir! I am a medical man! Sir! and forthwith the nature of things
is picked to pieces, and there is a race, with the last the winner, between
Philosophy mounted on Folly's donkey, and Folly mounted on Philosophy's
donkey. How fortunate {202} it is for Law that her battles are fought by
politicians in the Houses of Parliament. Not that it is better done: but
then _politics_ bears the blame."

I now come to the medical review. After a quantity of remark which has been
already disposed of, the writer shows Greek learning, a field in which the
old physician would have had a little knowledge. A. B., for the joke's
sake, had left untranslated, as being too deep, a remarkably easy sentence
of Aristotle, to the effect that what has happened was possible, for if
impossible it would not have happened. The reviewer, in "simple
astonishment,"--it was simple--at the pretended incapacity--I was told by
A. B. that the joke was intended to draw out a reviewer--translates:--He
says that this sentence is A. B.'s summing up of the evidence of
Spiritualism. Now, being a sort of _alter ego_[347] of A. B., I do declare
that he is not such a fool as to rest the evidence of Spiritualism--the
_spirit explanation_--upon the occurrence of certain facts proving the
possibility of those very facts. In truth, A. B. refuses to receive
spiritualism, while he receives the facts: this is the gist of his whole
preface, which simply admits spiritualism among the qualified candidates,
and does not know what others there may be.

The reviewer speaks of Aristotle as "that clear thinker and concise
writer." I strongly suspect that his knowledge of Aristotle was limited to
the single sentence which he had translated or got translated. Aristotle is
concise in _phrase_, not in book, and is powerful and profound in thought:
but no one who knows that his writing,