that the use of money is sure and speedy spending. "For his part," he
says, "he puts his down his neck, and gets the good of it."

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is, that it runs into
indifferentism, and then into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall
be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years
hence. Life's well enough; but we shall be glad to get out of it, and
they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our
meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have
had enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's
nothing new or true,--and no matter."

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an
ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees
nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in coming
into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here
at all." I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly
to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, "Mankind is a
damned rascal:" and the natural corollary is pretty sure to
follow,--"The world lives by humbug, and so will I."

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each
other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there
arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,
the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He
labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not
go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool; no