The man who knows, often finds himself at great disadvantage in the presence of fact-gatherers and persons who opine. His attitude is necessarily affirmative, and often, to the great scandal and contempt of his adversaries, simply affirmative. It does not enter into his calculations to have actively to defend a position which he sees to be impregnable; and when he leaves his proper occupation of “climbing trees in the Hesperides” to wield his club against those who know of no such trees, he is like a Hercules fighting mosquitoes. They cannot even see his club, and the conflict generally ends, as did that between the Lady and Comus, with an angry and wholly unconvincing assertion of incompetence. Fain would I something say, yet to what end? Thou hast nor ear, nor soul to apprehend The sublime notion and high mystery That must be utter’d to unfold the sage And serious doctrine of virginity. And thou art worthy that thou should’st not know More happiness than is thy present lot. Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric, That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence; Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced. Wordsworth, in a still greater passion, calls his scientific adversary “a fingering slave.” Of course this sort of thing tends to make the relations of the parties unpleasant; and in the eyes of the world the man of immense “information” and convinced ignorance goes off with the laurels. Metaphysics for the most part is justly open to the objection that it attempts to explain things which Aristotle declares to be too simple to be intelligible--things which we cannot see with definiteness, not because they are beyond the focus of the mind’s eye, but because they are too much within it. The metaphysician Hegel says that the sense of honour arises from our consciousness of infinite personal value. This may not be wholly satisfactory, but it is helpful; it is a part of the truth. But what do physicists make of such things as honour and chastity? They certainly endeavour to explain such ideas and feelings as they do everything else, but their explanations necessarily discredit these and all other things which profess to have “infinite value,” and which wise men know to have infinite value.