On his own principles he is convicted of being a lover of mischief. No, one is sorely tempted to think that these men are well aware that the moral sense which sound philosophy and Christian faith have developed, is still strong in the minds and deeper conscience of the English-speaking races, and that were they to present materialism in all its loathsome nudity to the public gaze, they would be hissed off the stage. And so they dress it up in the clothes of the old religion just for the present, with many a quiet wink between themselves at the expense of the "semi-scientific" reader. We have already adverted to Mr. Laing's utter incapacity for anything like philosophy, except so far as that term can be applied to a power of raking together, selecting, and piling up into "a popular shape" the scraps of information which favour the view whose correctness he was convinced of ere he began. A few further remarks may justify this somewhat severe estimate. After stating that in the solution of life and soul problems, science stops short at germs and nucleated cells, he proceeds with the usual tirade against metaphysics: "Take Descartes' fundamental axiom: _Cogito ergo sum_.... Is it really an axiom?... If the fact that I am conscious of thinking proves the fact that I exist, is the converse true that whatever does not think does not exist?... Does a child only begin to exist when it begins to think? If _Cogito ergo sum_ is an institution to which we can trust, why is not _Non cogito ergo non sum?_" [34] Here is a man posing before the gaping millions as a philosopher and a severe logician, who thinks that the proposition, "every cow is a quadruped," is disproved by the evident falsehood of, "what is not a cow is not a quadruped," which he calls "the converse." He sums up magnificently by saying: "These are questions to which no metaphysical system that I have ever seen, can return the semblance of an answer;" giving the impression of a life devoted to a deep and exhaustive study of all schools of philosophy. Mr. Laing here surely is addressing his "younger readers."