The short biography which Prof. F. Pollock contributed to the first edition of his lectures and essays gives an interesting sketch of the phases of opinion through which Clifford passed. It appears that before he took his degree in 1867 and for a little time after he was a high churchman; but, says Pollock, “there was an intellectual and speculative activity about his belief which made it impossible that he should remain permanently at that stage.” “He never slackened in the pursuit of scientific knowledge and ideas,” and conscious of a hiatus between orthodox views and some of the results of science he yet held that religious beliefs are outside the region of scientific proof and that there is a special theological faculty or insight, analogous to the scientific, poetic, and artistic faculties, the persons in whom this genius is exceptionally developed being the founders of new religions and religious orders. This is not unlike the solution of religious doubts which Hume playfully suggested and which John Henry Newman has seriously adopted, namely that “divinity, or theology, has a foundation in _reason_ so far as it is supported by experience. But its best and most solid foundation is _faith_ and divine revelation.” “When or how,” continues his biographer, “Clifford first came to a clear perception that this position of quasi-scientific Catholicism was untenable I do not exactly know; but I know that the discovery cost him an intellectual and moral struggle, of which traces may be found here and there in his essays. Most readers of these essays would consider that Clifford is very unfair to the Christian beliefs which he had abandoned and beyond doubt he felt a certain grudge against them for having so long duped him.”[37] The theories of Mr. Darwin and Herbert Spencer took the place in Clifford’s mind of the old fashioned creed; Natural selection was to unriddle the universe, to yield a new system of ethics and education. We read that Clifford had an extraordinary power of taking up a theory provisionally, of throwing himself into it, accepting it, applying it, and of rejecting it in case it was not satisfactory; and this may account perhaps for his somewhat dogmatic assertion in many cases of crude views. There is one characteristic of Clifford however which all may emulate, and that is the candor and fearlessness of his thinking and speaking. Let me quote a few words from one of the best and most stirring of these essays: