I do not care the least on my own account, but I see my words might be twisted into meaning that you had told me something about your previous guest, and that I referred to what you had said. Of course you had done nothing of the kind, but as a wary old fox, experienced sufferer from the dodges of the misrepresenter, I feel bound not to let you get into any trouble if I can help it. A regular lady's P.S. this. P.S.--Letter returned herewith. To Mr. Leslie Stephen. Hodeslea, October 16, 1894. My dear Stephen, I am very glad you like to have my omnium gatherum, and think the better of it for gaining me such a pleasant letter of acknowledgment. It is a great loss to me to be cut off from all my old friends, but sticking closely to my hermitage, with fresh air and immense quantities of rest, have become the conditions of existence for me, and one must put up with them. I have not paid all the debt incurred in my Oxford escapade yet--the last "little bill" being a sharp attack of lumbago, out of which I hope I have now emerged. But my deafness alone should bar me from decent society. I have not the moral courage to avoid making shots at what people say, so as not to bore them; and the results are sometimes disastrous. I don't see there is any real difference between us. You are charitable enough to overlook the general immorality of the cosmos on the score of its having begotten morality in one small part of its domain. Ever yours very faithfully, T.H. Huxley. To Mr. G-- S--. [See above.] Hodeslea, October 31, 1894. Dear Mr. S--, "Liver," "lumbago," and other small ills the flesh is heir to, have been making me very lazy lately, especially about letter-writing. You have got into the depths where the comprehensible ends in the incomprehensible--where the symbols which may be used with confidence so far begin to get shaky. It does not seem to me absolutely necessary that matter should be composed of solid particles. The "atoms" may be persistent whirlpools of a continuous "substance"--which substance, if at rest, could not affect us (all sensory impression being dependent on motion) and subsequently would FOR US = 0. The evolution of matter would be the getting under weigh of this "nothing for us" until it became the "something for us," the different motions of which give us the mental states we call the qualities of things. But it needs a very steady head to walk safely among these abysses of thought, and the only use of letting the mind range among them is as a corrective to the hasty dogmatism of the so-called materialists, who talk just as glibly of that of which they know nothing as the most bigoted of the orthodox.