talents they are credited with. But the fact is we find it needful to set up some authority besides the cultivators of the several arts and sciences. Now, rich men possessing precisely what is the ultimate aim of science and art, to wit, wealth and its accompaniment power, appear to us to be the fittest conventional judges of those sciences and arts. We know it is highly illogical to do this, but when you have lived long in Colymbia you will find that we are little governed by logic in our public actions, but almost entirely by precedent, tradition and convention. And yet we get on wonderfully well; as you would perhaps say in spite of our lack of logic, but, as we think, in consequence of having other standards besides that of logic to regulate our actions. The history of the world shows that when a nation attempts to discard the fictions of convention and strives to regulate all its actions by the strict rules of logical induction, it falls into terrible confusion and unutterable grief. The reason of this unexpected result may be that our premisses may not be so true as we think them—indeed the variations that are perpetually occurring in these premisses show that they are not so incontrovertible as we fondly imagine. Logical deduction from false premisses is certain to end in universal confusion. Where a conventional fiction is found useful we retain it until we can do without it. Thus our conventionalisms are, as it were, the apology for the truth; they are make-shift halting-houses to serve us till we have arrived at perfect truth, when they will no longer be of any use and will become extinct. You, in England, have similar conventional fictions, which are useful to you until you can ascertain the truth. Thus in chemistry you have your atomic
