Hâjî Abdû evidently holds that idolatry begins with a personal deity. And let us note that the latter is deliberately denied by the “Thirty-nine Articles.” With them God is “a Being without Parts (personality) or Passions.” He professes a vague Agnosticism, and attributes popular faith to the fact that Timor fecit Deos; “every religion being, without exception, the child of fear and ignorance” (Carl Vogt). He now speaks as the “Drawer of the Wine,” the “Ancient Taverner,” the “Old Magus,” the “Patron of the Mughân or Magians”; all titles applied to the Soofi as opposed to the Zâhid. His “idols” are the eidola (illusions) of Bacon, “having their foundations in the very constitution of man,” and therefore appropriately called _fabulæ_. That “Nature’s Common Course” is subject to various interpretation, may be easily proved. Aristotle was as great a subverter as Alexander; but the quasi-prophetical Stagyrite of the Dark Ages, who ruled the world till the end of the thirteenth century, became the “twice execrable” of Martin Luther; and was finally abolished by Galileo and Newton. Here I have excised two stanzas. The first is:— Theories for truths, fable for fact; system for science vex the thought Life’s one great lesson you despise— to know that all we know is nought. This is in fact:— Well didst thou say, Athena’s noblest son, The most we know is nothing can be known. The next is:— Essence and substance, sequence, cause, beginning, ending, space and time, These be the toys of manhood’s mind, at once ridiculous and sublime. He is not the only one who so regards “bothering Time and Space.” A late definition of the “infinitely great,” viz., that the idea arises from denying form to any figure; of the “infinitely small,” from refusing magnitude to any figure, is a fair specimen of the “dismal science”—metaphysics. Another omitted stanza reads:— How canst thou, Phenomen! pretend the Noumenon to mete and span? Say which were easier probed and proved, Absolute Being or mortal man? One would think that he had read Kant on the “Knowable and the Unknowable,” or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could “differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite.” It is a common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena, the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the “residuum of a bad metaphysic,” which deforms the system of Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are, or can be conceived, things in themselves (_i.e._, unrelated to thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that we cannot know what they are. But who dares say “cannot”? Who can measure man’s work when he shall be as superior to our present selves as we are to the Cave-man of past time?