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THE NEW GUIDES TO FAITH AND BELIEF.

ANONYMOUS. ABRIDGED.

OURS is a wise and earnest age, an age of thought and science,

To error, ignorance, and bliss we fairly bid defiance, "Professors" everywhere abound, both in and out of colleges,

And all agog to cram our nobs with "isms" and with ologies."

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Philosophy, as you're aware, material and mental,

At one extreme is "Positive," at t'other "Transcendental,"

And each of us who in these days would speculate "en

règle,"

If he can't run the rig with Comte, must take the tip from Hegel.

The fundamental problem which, debated now for ages, Is still attacked and still unsolved by all our modern sages,

Is, if an effort I may make a simple form to throw it in, Just what we know, and why we know, and what's the way we know it in.

We can't assume (so Comte affirms) a first or final

cause,

Phenomena are all we know, their order and their laws,

While Hegel's modest formula, a single line to sum in, Is "nothing is and nothing's not, but everything's becomin'."

"Development" is all the go, of course, with Herbert Spencer,

Who cares but little more than Comte about the "why" and "whence," Sir!

Appearances, he seems to think, do not exhaust totality, But indicate that underneath there's some "Unknown Reality."

And Darwin, too, who leads the throng "in vulgum voces spargere,

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Maintains Humanity is naught except a big menagerie. The progeny of tailless apes, sharp-eared but puggynosed,

Who nightly climbed their "family trees," and on the top reposed.

There's Carlyle, on the other hand, whose first and last concern it is

To preach up the "immensities" and muse on the "eternities";

But if one credits what he hears, the gist of all his brag is,

That "Erbwürst," rightly understood, is transcendental "Haggis."

Imaginative sparks, you know, electric currents kindle, On Alpine heights or at Belfast, within the brain of Tyndall,

His late address, some people hold, is flowery, vague,

and vapory,

And represents the "classic nude" when stripped of all its " Draper "-y.

Professor Huxley has essayed to bridge across the chasm,

"Twixt matter dead and matter quick by means of "protoplasm,"

And to his doctrine now subjoins the further “grand attraction

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That "consciousness" in man and brute is simply "reflex action."

Then Stanley Jevons will contend, in words stout and emphatical,

The proper mode to treat all things is purely mathematical!

Since we as individual men, communities, and nations, Are clearly angles, lines, and squares, cubes, circles, and equations.

George Henry Lewes, I'm informed, had "gone off quite hysterical"

About that feeble, foolish thing the "theory Metempirical";

And only found relief, 'tis said, from nervous throes and spasms,

By banging straight at Huxley's head a brace of brandnew "plasms."

Such are the philosophic views I've ventured now to

versify,

And, if I may invent the term, in some degree to "tersify."

Among them all, I'm bold to say, fair room for choice you'll find,

And if you don't, why then you won't, and I, for one, sha'n't mind.

A COLD IN THE HEAD.

CHARLES LAMB.

DID you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot and my excuse. My fingers drag heavily over this paper, and to my thinking it is three and twenty furlongs from here to the end of this demi-sheet. I have not a thing to say; no thing is of more importance than another; I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; emptier than Judge Park's wig when the head is in it; duller than a country stage when the actors are off it; a cipher, an 0; I acknowledge life at all, only by an occasional convulsional cough, and a permanent phlegmatic pain in the chest. I am weary of the world; life is weary of me. My day is gone into twilight, and I don't think it worth the expense of candles. My wick hath a thief in it, but I can't muster courage to snuff it. I inhale suffocation; I can't distinguish veal from mutton; nothing interests me. 'Tis twelve o'clock, and Thurtell is just

now coming out upon the New Drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality; yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, "Will it?" I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub Street attic, to let—not so much as a joint-stool or a cracked pitcher left in it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are off. Oh, for a vigorous fit of gout, colic, toothache, -an earwig in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs! Pain is life-the sharper, the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold, a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and everything? Yet do I try all I can to cure it; I try wine, and spirits, and smoking, and snuff in unsparing quantities; but they all only seem to make me worse, instead of better. I sleep in a damp room, but it does me no good; I come home late o' nights, but do not find any visible amendment! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?

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