common-sense humour for simplifying things, treating them broadly,
and emphasizing resemblances rather than differences, we can find
excellent reasons for ignoring recognised lines of demarcation,
calling everything by a new name, and unifying up till we have
united the two most distant stars in heaven as meeting and being
linked together in the eyes and souls of men; if we are in this
humour individuality after individuality disappears, and ere long,
if we are consistent, nothing will remain but one universal whole,
one true and only atom from which alone nothing can be cut off and
thrown away on to something else; if, on the other hand, we are in a
subtle philosophically accurate humour for straining at gnats and
emphasizing differences rather than resemblances, we can draw
distinctions, and give reasons for subdividing and subdividing,
till, unless we violate what we choose to call our consistency
somewhere, we shall find ourselves with as many names as atoms and
possible combinations and permutations of atoms. The lines we draw,
the moments we choose for cutting this or that off at this or that
place, and thenceforth the dubbing it by another name, are as
arbitrary as the moments chosen by a South-Eastern Railway porter
for leaving off beating doormats; in each case doubtless there is an
approximate equity, but it is of a very rough and ready kind.

What else, however, can we do? We can only escape the Scylla of
calling everything by one name, and recognising no individual
existences of any kind, by falling into the Charybdis of having a
name for everything, or by some piece of intellectual sharp practice
like that of the shrewd but unprincipled Ulysses. If we were
consistent honourable gentlemen, into Charybdis or on to Scylla we
should go like lambs; every subterfuge by the help of which we
escape our difficulty is but an arbitrary high-handed act of