Pope's cynicism has been lately re-echoed in various comparisons. A death-watch has been supposed to speculate on the final end of a clock; a timepiece on the nature of its makers. Writers who use similitudes may be asked to remember that if Man really possesses reason (to say nothing of an immortal spirit), he cannot be ranged in analogy with apes, death-watches, and timepieces. The moment brute organisms, or inorganic constructions, are represented as _reasoning_, they cease to be what they are--a Thing suddenly becomes a Person. If this were all, the speech and faculties of Man would be represented as intact, though veiled beneath some shape worthy of the invention of a Babrias or an Æsop. But this is not all. The monstrous shape is at once both Thing and Person, and its thinkings in this double character are supposed to show by their grotesque failures the absurdity of our human endeavour to reason concerning God or Immortality. To this whole kind of preoccupation the third Chapter is addressed. There are really no special difficulties in the way of Theism. It argues from the known to the unknown; so do all the inductive sciences. It accepts more than it can explain; so do we, each and all, in accepting the truth of our own individuality and personal identity, of the world outside us, and the mind within, which scrutinizes that changing world. The more thoroughly questions relating to our first sources of knowledge are debated, the more surely shall we perceive how safe is the starting-point of Natural Theology. Against Materialism, on the other hand, there may be urged a series of difficulties properly its own, and this may be most easily seen by placing it in contrast with pure Idealism. The Materialistic starting-point is from an unauthorized postulate--in common parlance, an unfounded assumption; each step it takes is attended with a fresh need of postulation, amounting at last to the gravest burden of improbability. And when the materializing goal is reached we gain nothing--no treasure is discovered--no vista opened into new realms of intellectual or moral empire. We are only told that our supposed insight was but a dream. We are only warned to dream no more. Materialism has murdered insight.