He said a good deal more to the same effect, and I was beginning to wonder how much longer he would think it necessary to insist on what was so obvious, when his hearers began to differ from him. One dilated on the correlation between pain and pleasure which ensured that neither could be extinguished without the extinguishing along with it of the other. Another said that throughout the animal and vegetable worlds there was found what might be counted as a system of rewards and punishments; this, he contended, must cease to exist (and hence virtue must cease) if the pain attaching to misconduct were less notoriously advertised. Another maintained that the horror so freely expressed by many at the sight of pain was as much selfish as not—and so on. Let Erewhon be revisited by the son of the original writer—let him hint that his father used to write the advertisements for Mother Seigel’s Syrup. He gradually worked his way up to this from being a mere writer of penny tracts. [Dec. 1896.] On reaching the country he finds that divine honours are being paid him, churches erected to him, and a copious mythology daily swelling, with accounts of the miracles he had worked and all his sayings and doings. If any child got hurt he used to kiss the place and it would get well at once. Everything has been turned topsy-turvy in consequence of his flight in the balloon being ascribed to miraculous agency. Among other things, he had maintained that sermons should be always preached by two people, one taking one side and another the opposite, while a third summed up and the congregation decided by a show of hands. This system had been adopted and he goes to hear a sermon On the Growing Habit of Careful Patient Investigation as Encouraging Casuistry. [October 1897.] XIX Truth and Convenience Opposites YOU may have all growth or nothing growth, just as you may have all mechanism or nothing mechanism, all chance or nothing chance, but you must not mix them. Having settled this, you must proceed at once to mix them. Two Points of View Everything must be studied from the point of view of itself, as near as we can get to this, and from the point of view of its relations, as near as we can get to them. If we try to see it absolutely in itself, unalloyed with relations, we shall find, by and by, that we have, as it were, whittled it away. If we try to see it in its relations to the bitter end, we shall find that there is no corner of the universe into which it does not enter. Either way the thing eludes us if we try to grasp it with the horny hands of language and conscious thought. Either way we can think it perfectly well—so long as we don’t think about thinking about it. The pale cast of thought sicklies over everything.